At Warscapes: Poetry by Mohamed Eno

The newest issue of Warscapes includes poetry by Mohamed Eno, from his new volume, Vertical Articulation. At Warscapes, his poetry is introduced by Noam Scheindlin: check it out!

In Mohamed Eno’s poems, the world of myth and folk tales interact with the "real" world, so that each seems to breach the boundaries of the other: the effect is disturbing, and thought-provoking. Drawing on representations and stories of evil in southern Somalia, Eno creates a world which seems to come without the insulation that myths and tales provide, without the reassurance that there is a storyteller in control. Both poems offer narratives that do not resolve themselves, or that end only in a reduplication of the crisis that sets the narrative in motion: the goose that appears in a graveyard prefigures a vicious king, who has already come: the story is already over, with us, in it. A leader’s burial is pre-empted by a half-human/half-crocodile, who stands watch over the corpse, until the corpse too turns into a hybrid human/animal, as the story continues to replicate itself. Narrative seems to fall apart in these poems, or to obliterate it. It is intolerance that seems to undo old stories, and turn them into hybrids that ward off interpretation, that leave us in the uninterpretable now. [...]

Begin to read Mohamed Eno's poems at Warscapes.