Kalimba

Author: Petero Kalulé

Publisher: Guillemot Press (2019)

Kalimba is the wonderful debut collection of Petero Kalulé, a Ugandan poet, composer and multi-instrumentalist currently completing a PhD in law at Queen Mary University of London.

Meant to be performed with flute, bells, saxophone and thumb piano, Kalimba is a playful, musical collection that weighs language, history, dreamwork and presence.

Kalimba is printed on Mohawk Superfine and Fedrigoni papers, section sewn, with a cover image by Ria Gunton. The idea for this book was to turn the book itself into a Kalimba, complete with acoustic hole. The ‘acoustic hole’ was cut out using a die and a 1920s Thompson letterpress.

"Petero Kalulé’s Kalimba is part of a movement of poetic breath taking place; an aesthetic embodied and grounded in historical geographies and cultural location. A poetics working within, through and, perhaps, against a lyric tradition. To read Kalimba is really to listen to a set of sonic languages that mediate social thought."

–Kashif Sharma-Patel