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M. Ayodele Heath is a poet so fierce, so tender, so (rightly) angry, so generous of heart and spirit that I am 1) grateful, and 2) reminded again and again why I love poetry, why I have reason to love poetry: because it can be like this!

— Thomas Lux, author of God Particles

In this electrifying first collection of poems, Ayodele Heath explores “otherness” -- Black otherness, Southern otherness, African otherness, his otherness which becomes our otherness and everyone's otherness -- with such heat and such heart and such precision and magic that the words fairly fly off the page. This is language swooning and falling in love with itself; “consonants sharp as fangs and clean/ as bone.”  Here are poems “burning the pages in my eyes;” poems that are sharp, hip, sassy and smart as whips, taut as drums; poems full of beauty and horror and passion, unpredictable at every turn. This is the kind of poetry that keeps poetry alive.

— Cecilia Woloch

The words of M. Ayodele Heath are ‘a foam which knows no foreign shore.’ With his latest collection, Otherness, Heath bathes us in pools flooded with humankind’s purest mind. A golden tongued man teaching the tone deaf to dance, his beat filled heart pulsing arrhythmic codes to the misbegotten, one eye witnesses the gore and the other praises glory. Open this book and allow this high priest of prosody to reveal the secrets of okra seeds germinating beneath the djembe’s skin.

— Robert Earl Price poet/ playwright

M. Ayodele Heath’s Otherness is many-voiced, peopled with a rich and real throng of speakers clamoring to have their say. Heath seems part stage director, part mimic, part ventriloquist as he channels and divines and ultimately bears witness to this subject of “otherness,” the history and repercussions of race in America and abroad. His ear is outrageously good, his music rangy, unswerving, and often dizzyingly ambitious. This is a remarkable first collection. 

— Paula McLain, author of Less of Her, Stumble, Gorgeous and The Paris Wife