Handsome Jita: Selected Poems

Vonani Bila is one of South Africa's most incisive and socially-critical poetic voices. His is the eye that refuses to look away. With unfaltering clarity he brings to light the stories of shame, degradation, and despair that lurk in the hidden reaches of the South African national consciousness, and conscience. His poems invoke the shadow world of alternate reality inhabited by the denizens of the social fringes: sex workers, destitute pensioners, victims of violence, both domestic and political, as well as the other social and political discards - the 'inconvenient truths' of a South Africa 'that has the best constitution in the world.' In Handsome Jita, readers will discover that Vonani Bila's poetry is breathtaking in its narrative command and its intelligent articulate anger.