Poetry
Winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets 2023
“Angola, America is unsparing in its depiction of death row’s horrors and incisive in its examination of white privilege…” – The TLS
Angola, America takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems by poet Sammy Weaver, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.
What is particularly convincing about these poems is the moral fervor that accompanies an ear that delights in the complexities of language and the music of syntax. It is an emphatic voice, observant to the smallest details and yet steps back from an intrusive ‘authorial’ presence to let these prisoners and landscapes breathe and be. We observe with the author the society that builds these institutions in which the protagonists survive under extraordinary pressures. We come to acknowledge that we are responsible for the contemporary establishment and continuance of these places.
The ‘Prison Industrial Complex’ is excoriated through artful conceits. There are poems about handcuffs, the Louisiana State Flag, the electric chair. Throughout, the fate of the body is aligned with the fate of the landscape, we see Louisiana’s famously endangered coastline, prone to hurricanes and oil-spills. Formally, the work is adept, with many 14-line proto-sonnets and then longer-lined free verse poems that are nevertheless, wonderfully compact. it conveys anger without hysteria, empathy without condescension, and pulls us through its compelling narratives with style and flair.
Sammy Weaver
Sammy Weaver was born in Hereford and grew up in Hay-on-Wye. She has an Anthropology BSc from University College London and a Creative Writing MA from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poems have appeared in The Moth, The Irish Times, The Island Review and Anthropocene, and have been anthologised in various collections. She won The Moth Magazine’s Nature Writing competition in 2020. She was shortlisted for a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry and Nine Arches Press’ Primers scheme in 2021. Sammy’s first pamphlet Angola, America (Seren) won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021.
Her essays and reviews can be found online at Lucy Writers Platform. She has collaborated with various composers, most recently with Welsh composer Tywi Roberts on a reimagining of the Welsh myth Blodeuwedd. The collaboration culminated in a multi-media chorale that was performed at the PRiSM Future Music Festival at the Royal Northern College of Music. In 2021, Sammy’s poetry-film ‘Axolotl’ debuted at Newcastle University’s Beastly Landscapes: Investigations of Human-Non-Human Encounters Symposium. She was writer-in-residence at the Julian Trust Night Shelter for the homeless in Bristol in 2017.
Sammy works for the Arvon Foundation as part of their programming and community outreach team based at their writing house, Lumb Bank. She also works for the reading charity The Reader, delivering reading groups for wellbeing in prisons. She lives on a narrowboat in West Yorkshire.
“Sammy Weaver’s Angola, America is an incredibly courageous and sustained high wire act of empathy. This powerful sequence interrogates the death row prison system as a manifestation of institutional racism, the prisoners ‘perishing under felony / which is just another word for lonely, or colony.’ These unnerving, courageous poems explore the manifold inhumanities of prison – its strange histories – of guard wolf-dogs, of rodeos, and its tragedies – and examine the frightening apparatus of imprisonment and execution. There are poems I flinch from, but Weaver’s imagination is powerfully transformative, and her musical skills as a poet are unsurpassable. A poem about an electric chair becomes an elegy for the “manydead” flown from it, the knots in the wood left like “empty nests”. These are acutely sensitive, wounded poems that speak into the heart of suffering. I find myself transformed by them.”
Fiona Benson
‘Sammy Weaver takes us into the USA’s prison system and its structured cruelties, racialised politics, and precious moments of humanity. There is a brutal, beautiful physicality to the language used here, creating alluring poems of reportage that have a tensile strength to them, to bear the pain witnessed. Angola, America is a sharp and startling debut.’
Rishi Dastidar
“Bearing witness to the state’s violence against incarcerated Black citizens, Angola, America is unsparing in its depiction of death row’s horrors and incisive in its examination of white privilege…”
Imogen Cassels, The Times Literary Supplement
“The poems are tough, traversing barbarity with empathy and dexterous intelligence; and they are finely written, often surprising in the originality and aptness of their imagery … There’s a masterful balance of the lyrical and minimalist throughout. But what’s most remarkable is the beauty of what is rendered … In all, I was stunned, sickened, spellbound, and ultimately transformed by this pamphlet. What a poet! I’m in awe and urge you to go and buy this book immediately.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“These are poems which fiercely interrogate the death penalty and the American prison system – not subjects for the faint of heart … There’s a dizzying poetry at work here … a music in the way that Weaver zooms in on the natural elements which a dreaming mind might latch onto when imprisoned.”
Neil Prince, The Friday Poem
