Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

Fear knows no borders, and the terminology of hate has seeped into every aspect of life.

As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.

To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.

The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness.

Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has presciently pointed out, neoliberal corporate globalism threatens to exploit that advantage like never before, and it seems set to turn vast swathes of humanity into "the Negros of a new racism."