dear reader,are you still there?take a second, now.breathe //with me. In one of the most anticipated debut collections of recent years, Maneo Mohale reckons boldly with the experience of – and the reconstruction of a life after – a sexual assault.Mohale’s unapologetic and disarming voice carries through a budding and blooming garden of poetics, rooted in a contemporary southern African tradition, but springing forth in queer and radical new directions. Indeed, this is a work encompassing the full, often contradictory, and seldom complete process of healing: where relations must be chosen as well as made; where time becomes non-linear and language insufficient; where nothing is what it seems, yet everything is what it is.