The eagerly-awaited second collection from acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi, following Kumukanda, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is the author of two pamphlets, and a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize, the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Prize. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, and an Associate Poet at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He has performed his work at festivals and events around the world, is Poetry Editor for The White Review, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.
Chingonyi's poetic voice finds its full-throated maturity... Deep
introspection becomes the vulnerable and brave heart of the book,
rendered into jewel-like poems in "Origin Myth"... An elegantly
spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that
invites repeated reading
*Telegraph*
A Blood Condition is a thing of beauty. It's a pleasure to read
such a sure and strident second outing from one of our most
celebrated young poets
*Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2021**
I was changed by Kayo Chingonyi's recent volume of poems, A Blood
Condition. The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you
feel altered by it
*New Statesman*
A Blood Condition has a dignity that honours the past without
indulging in any overflow of personal feeling. Dignity is an
interesting quality in a writer - it cannot be faked without
presenting as pomposity. Chingonyi's authentic, reined-in passions
are stirring... Chingonyi's poems grow out of gaps, out of the
moments when nothing more can be done. The dead cannot be
recovered, time cannot be reclaimed, the damage to the river is
likely to be permanent, but a poem can be written and take its
quietly powerful stand
*Observer*
A deep thread of loss runs through these poems, and an attempt to
reintegrate a past that spans Zambia, Newcastle and London... These
fine poems weigh their sorrows carefully, reminding us how best we
might "carry a well of myth / in the pit of our pith"
*Guardian*
There is thrilling formal accomplishment on display in these
poems... poignant and moving... there are brilliant evocations of
the north of England
*Poetry Book Society*
Chingonyi seems to have hit upon the telling image, the
poem-as-snapshot, as a means of making his writing at once more
exposed and more sharply defined... This new version of Chingonyi's
voice, whittled down to its essentials and built on the seen, is
behind almost all the best poems here... A Blood Condition...[is] a
significant development in his work
*Times Literary Supplement*
Kayo Chingonyi's second book, A Blood Condition, is one of the most
arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year. His
ability to blend music, grief and yearning is unmatched
*Guardian*
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