Siphokazi Jonas’s debut poetry collection, Weeping Becomes a River, will be published by Penguin Random House in September!

‘I was breathless after reading this collection. It is exquisite, courageous, energising, boundary-scaling, mesmerising, moving.’ – Gabeba Baderoon

Jonas is a poet, playwright and actor with an MA in English Literature and a BA in English and Drama. She was the 2016 runner-up for the national Sol Plaatje European Union Award and headlined as the first Featured Poet at the Poetry Africa Festival in 2021. Jonas received a Best Short Film South African Film and Television Award (Safta) as co-producer of the poetry film #WeAreDyingHere. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, Atlanta Review, Versopolis Review, The Poetry Society and Stanzas.

Limited signed copies of Weeping Becomes a River are available for pre-order (South Africa only) from the author’s website.

About the book

If a Shakespearean actor, a Christian missionary and an isiXhosa praise poet walked into a bar, their conversation would sound something like the poems in this collection.

Siphokazi Jonas is a weaver of seemingly discordant worlds; growing up in an Afrikaans dorpie during the transition years of a newly democratic South Africa and going on annual holidays to a village made this a necessity. Her work as a spoken word poet often fuses poetry, theatre and film, and she brings this genre-mixing to the page by using the intsomi form to weave the narrative of her poems together.

Jonas’s poems explore the impact of linguistic and cultural alienation as a black learner in former Model C schools in the 1990s and early 2000s. She is not only a referee of the internal war between isiXhosa and English within her, but she pieces together a language for leaving and returning between the past and the present, and a possible future. Her poems ask questions about navigating tradition, religion, migration between rural and urban spaces, and how families choose to make their own culture.

Weeping Becomes a River is a timely reflection on the cost of being the early test subjects of South Africa’s democratic project.

Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags New books New releases Penguin Random House SA Poetry Siphokazi Jonas Weeping Becomes a River