After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to the bones of his craft – poetic exploration and wordplay. His début pamphlet, Flood Season, begins with seeds of perennial flooding, a phenomenon as familiar to residents of Accra as it is to residents of Assam, and blossoms into an exploration of diasporic belonging, the tensions between who we are and the clichés that surround our nation states. Ultimately, the poems hint that we might all be routinely, “caught in the delicate act of restraining/ Home in clasped hands/ Held to the ear, listening for a way back”. Flood Season carries the weight of its musings with an ease akin to water uprooting a misplaced house, and fizzes with the joy of a burst dam.
