This book is about the poetry, vision, and deeply inhospitable context of one of South Africa's most talented praise poets, D.L.P. Yali-Manisi. The author of five volumes of Xhosa poetry and performer of inspired and elegantly crafted izibongo (praise poems), Manisi saw himself as a man of multiple places, allegiances, and identities at a time when these markers of self were rigidly policed. This book examines Manisi as an inventive negotiator of rural and urban spaces, modernity and tradition, performance and publication, the local and the foreign. It will appeal to scholars in...