Lyrical Textiles
About the author:
Gabriel Awuah Mainoo hails from Ghana, raised as a sportsman by his father in football and tennis. He pursues tertiary education at the University of Cape Coast. Mainoo is a special prize winner of Sōka Matsubara International Haiku contest, winner of Forty Under 40 Awards for Authorship and Creative Writing, Light Factory Publication, Ghanaian Writing on Migration and Diaspora chapbook winner, and semifinalist of the Jack Grape International Poetry Prize. He is the author of Travellers Gather Dust and Lust,We are Moulting Birds, Chicken Wings at the Altar, and 60 Aces of Haiku. He serves as project manager for Ghana Writes Literary Group, creative editor for WGM Magazine and African Poetry Editor for Better Than Starbucks Poetry and Fiction Journal. Mainoo is a tennis professional in the morning, a student in the afternoon, and writer in the evening.
Reviews
“Healing means evacuating the grief / & rolling home in the music of rivers,” writes Gabriel Awuah Mainoo in Lyrical Textiles, a collection of poems that admonishes one not to grieve, but instead to realize that “living in the fall is thriving.” Mainoo is both a romantic but also an ironic realist, as he writes, “you know life has a stern strategy for dying with hope / it requires a skill to live many times.” Among the motifs Mainoo unfolds, including music and sports—he is an avid tennis player and celebrates the game—these poems offer resiliency: “hatch a dream, lift it/ from the haze, / coil a prayer around it, and name it sun.” In “Piano,” he writes “we are always plunged in every phrase”: this could easily be Mainoo’s ars poetica, where each phrase, whether cast in a conventional beat or not, resonates long into the night, asking us to attend to life as it is living and surviving.
-James McCorkle, M.F.A., Ph.D., Visiting Associate Professor, Co-Director of Africana Studies at Hobart William Smith Colleges
Author of Evidences, The Subtle Bodies, and In Time
This volume of poetry is rich in language, structure and content. Many of the poems in this collection justify Wordsworth’s definition of poetry... 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.' The blend of the supernatural world seamlessly with the human reality is seen in this work. It touches on almost every aspect of human endeavors with the sole purpose of addressing the problems of our society. Depth is what these poems carry in expressing the human feeling in a surreal manner.
-Waterz Yidana, Ghana, Award winning Author
Lyrical Textiles, eclectic as it is dense. No subject is left unattended to: from the blinkered vision(s) of our political leaders to refugees, heartaches, religion, tennis, grief etc. Mainoo is playful as he is contemplative; his poetry is thickly laced with dense imagery under a thinly laid veil of irony and humour, sometimes dark. Unwrapping layer after layer of sheer poetical brilliance that leaves the reader with a certain buzz of both awe & intrigue.
-Nyashadzashe Chikumbu, Zimbabwe, Mystery publishers
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5"
66 pages
Covers and endsheets are letterpress printed on handmade rag paper, interior paper is 100% recycled.
The e-book of Lyrical Textiles is available on Google Books
Description:
In this collection of 50 poems, Gabriel Awuah Mainoo weaves verses that are exploratory, both in scope and design. [Each poem possesses] the yearnings of youth and of humanity - for love, for belonging, for the future. The question of belonging and the search for love and truth is broached from the perspective of a human being, an African, a man, a black man, and ultimately, as in "Questions that matter," from the perspective of one who seeks to know what really are the most basic life hacks (from the foreword by Dr. Martin Egblewogbe).