Peach Picks: Two Things to Read This Week
AT PEACH: This Friday at Peach, we’ll be featuring a poem that made the shortlist of our inaugural Peach Gold in Poetry—Inam Kang’s “the feds don’t know i’m a scorpio.” Kang is a Pakistani-born, Muslim poet currently living in Cleveland, Ohio, and is a founder and co-curator of the POC-centered reading and dialogue series, FRUIT, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “the feds don’t know i’m a scorpio” is a beautiful unpacking of identity and its many in-betweens. In the poem Kang writes, “my birth certificate is full of mistakes. / i’m from a place, born / in another, living in a different / state of thirst.” The last lines ring out loudly: “nobody died except for someone’s / expectation that i stay / silent.” |
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IN PRINT: Binti By Nnedi Okorafor “But I never got the chance to tell him that my hair was braided into the history of my people,” Nnedi Okorafor writes, “Because what happened, happened.” Binti is a science fiction novella and the first of a trilogy, written by local author Nnedi Okorafor. Okorafor is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and a professor of English at the University at Buffalo. The first book of the series introduces readers to the character of Binti. She is the first of her people to ever be accepted into a prestigious university in space, and has just run away, leaving her family, friends, and all that she knows to board a ship and attend the university against her parents’ wishes. Binti is merely 90 pages, but is packed full of an immense amount of African history, contemporary forms of discrimination, and unimaginable circumstances. It was the recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction novella, and I can’t recommend it enough. —BRE KIBLIN |
“Peach Picks” is a column of literary news and recommendations written by the editors of Peach Mag, an online literary magazine based in Buffalo, New York. For inquiries, contact the editors at peachmgzn@gmail.com.