Join Siphokazi Jonas at Exclusive Books Rosebank for the launch of her stunning poetry collection Weeping Becomes a River (5 Nov)
More about the book!

Penguin Random House SA and Exclusive Books invite you to the launch of Siphokazi Jonas’s debut poetry collection, Weeping Becomes a River.

Jonas will be in conversation with Michael Titlestad at the event.

In Weeping Becomes a River Jonas confronts the linguistic and cultural alienation experienced as a black learner in former Model C schools in the 1990s and early 2000s, then fashions the fragments to reclaim and rewrite her place within a lineage of storytellers.

Migrating between forms, between poetry and intsomi, she navigates the waters of tradition, religion, intergenerational experiences of rural and urban spaces, and the ways in which family dynamics affect the body. She is not only a referee of the raging tensions within her, but she also pieces together a language for pathways of leaving and returning.

Her poems grapple with the past, the present, and possible futures without forgetting that ‘the body is marked territory from birth, and the scent of it never leaves’.