Agen Bien Fou is a radical collection of poems, combining elegiac poetry through the
personal with the political, confronting systemic oppression, imperialism, modern warfare and global complicity. Dedicated to the children of Gaza and the enduring spirit of resistance, Elmi addresses genocides and takes to account the billionaires that fund them, through powerful and moving poems charged with the revolutionary spirit. With the rawness and contemporary outrage of poems such as The Genocide Will Not Be Televised, that pulse through the collection, Elmi calls to witness the horrors of history as it unfolds before our eyes, the saturation of sufferance and the hope in realising our own humanity. Agen Bien Fou is an important and profound exploration of cultural survival, grief, and the defiant human spirit in the face of devastation.
"If 'this is no time for poets' but for teachers of history, Brecht knew that the bad time for poetry was when it was most needed, and that poets teach us the history we needed to learn but didn’t get taught. Samatar Elmi’s Agen Bien Fou raids registers of resistance from the Panthers to the Ghost Dance, turning the mendacity of official discourse “agenst” itself, pushing out from delicate lyric carapace to fractured lines braced against the violence of genocide and annihilation writ large on the world as it is. Yet as Elmi’s poem in memory of Sean Bonney knows only too well, in this moment the revolutionary is just another posture, “our protests contain us/in the language of our enemies/and syntax is a prison”. In response, poetry is the only language useless enough to slip under the door, the “negative light” that steals everything back."
– Dan Eltringham
Samatar Elmi is an award-winning poet musician. His debut collection The Epic of Cader Idris (Bloomsbury, 2024) received excellent reviews, and he is a Winner of the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for the poem ‘The Snail.’ His debut pamphlet, Portrait of Colossus (flipped eye press, 2021), was selected as a PBS Pamphlet Choice. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Magma, Poetry Wales, Iota and anthologised in More Fiya, Filigree, After Plath, and The Echoing Gallery. Elmi has performed at Laugharne Festival, Latitude Festival, London Literature Festival, Somali Week, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Poetry Society, Serpentine Gallery, Southbank Centre, Cardiff Millennium Centre, Oxford House, Whitechapel Gallery and Rich Mix. As Knomad Spock, he has released the albums Winter of Discontent, A Darker Light and Through the Walls to critical acclaim. He has also rapped on records with UK hiphop legends Chester P and Jehst, and released Preludes under the moniker Nomad.
KV20
ISBN 9781917998109
124 pp.
A6 pocket paperback.
Printed on fully recycled paper.
10 Copies signed by the author.
