Prins

Laid out like a film script, with poem titles that read as scene headings and camera cues, these poems replay a boyhood and adolescence in small-town and suburban streets, house shops, driveways, backyards, bathrooms and abandoned car parks. They look at fathers and sons, at friendships between boys and at the men of one family, praising tenderness and exposing harm, and write against fixed ideas of what coloured boys are. A father and son sit in a car outside church, a house party fills with smoke, a skateboard catches in a pothole. Identity is pieced together from found things: hip-hop and pharaohs, philosophers and painters, sour figs and baby oil, braids and fades, a backpack, a bottle of whisky, a Toyota.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

80 pages in the original

First published

2025 by Kwela

Author's age

32 when first published

ISBN

9780795711169 (original)