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Showing posts from January, 2018

The sh*thole chronicle

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President Donald J. Trump "If those countries weren't 'sh*tholes', why do their people want to come here (meaning the United States)?" I tend to hear that quite a lot. Not exactly in those words, but with the exact same idea behind it. Would the fact of Wikipedia asserting that �in 2016, the U.S. State Department estimated that there are 9 million U.S. citizens living abroad� turn the United States into a sh*thole? Apparently not; so we must look elsewhere for why other countries under equivalent circumstances are labelled as such. The English-language French newspaper The Local [thelocal.fr] says: �The number of French expats rose by 2 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year, making a total increase of 4.14 percent in two years. There [sic] total number of French nationals registered abroad has reached 1.7 million, according to France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs�. It continues: �However, while the figures reflect the growing tendency to move abroad, t

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Which poets or poems do you suggest?

Read Rethabile Masilo 's answer to Lately, I have developed an interest in reading poems. Which poets or poems do you suggest? on Quora

New poetry by Jim Pascual Agustin

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Born in Manila, Jim Pascual Agustin moved to Cape Town in 1994 to be with the Canadian-born South African woman he met while on holiday in the Mountain Province in the Philippines during the monsoon season of the previous year. Agustin writes and translates poetry and fiction in Filipino and English. His work has appeared in Rhino, World Literature Today and Modern Poetry in Translation, among others. Wings of Smoke ( The Onslaught Press , Oxford, 2017) is his eighth book of poetry. [ MORE ]

Interviewing Geoffrey Philp | Geosi Reads

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Geosi Gyasi : When did you start writing? Geoffrey Philp : I was sixteen and in love with the girl next door. I tried to write poems that would impress her. It didn�t work, but I kept on writing. [ MORE ] Geoffrey Philp

Keorapetse �Bra Willie� Kgositsile, RIP

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South Africa�s National Poet Laureate, Keorapetse �Bra Willie� Kgositsile, has died in Johannesburg. Kgositsile passed away at Milpark Hospital in Parktown. He was seventy-nine. Kgositsile was born in 1938 in Johannesburg, and attended Matibane High School. He began his writing career at the New Age, an anti-apartheid newspaper edited by political activist Ruth First, to which he contributed poetry and news reporting. [ MORE ] Keorapetse Kgositsile