A Blood Condition

The eagerly-awaited second collection from acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi, following Kumukanda, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize.

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

A Blood Condition tells a story of inheritance - the people, places, cultures and memories that form us. Kayo Chingonyi explores how distance and time, nations and a century’s history, can collapse within a body; our past continuous in our present. From London, Leeds, and The North East to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief and joy, the painful ongoing process of letting go, with remarkable music and clarity.

‘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