A Blood Condition

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*

The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi

Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history, can collapse within a body.

With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances -- of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go -- and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.

'A Blood Condition is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year' Guardian, Books of the Year 2021

'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' Diana Evans

'An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading' Telegraph

'The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you feel altered by it' Andrew O'Hagan

© Kayo Chingonyi 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • 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

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