Blue Hands, Brown Skin: Poems (Cave Canem Prize)

Blue Hands, Brown Skin is a powerful debut poetry collection about belonging, loss, migration, and the quiet resilience of women who carry entire homelands in their bodies. Moving between Kenya and Berlin, these poems explore how migration reshapes a life and what it means to grieve far from home, to navigate love and language across borders, and to return to oneself after being broken open by the world. Through storytelling and intimate lyricism, the poet examines how the body remembers what history tries to erase—from girlhood rituals and ancestral wisdom to the bureaucratic coldness of immigration lines and the loneliness of diaspora. Each poem becomes an altar to survival, a place where memory, motherhood, and identity meet.What makes this collection distinctive is its fusion of personal narrative with cultural myth, its fearless attention to the spiritual and emotional worlds of African women, and its insistence that softness, even in exile, is a form of strength. Blue Hands, Brown Skin is a testament to how we carry home within us, in our grief, in our names, and in the stories that refuse to be burned. Read more