Tanella Boni is a major African poet, and this book, The Future Has
an Appointment with the Dawn, is her first full collection to be
translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic
violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africa's Ivory
Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these
events onto a mythic topography where people live among their
ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful, who are at
once magical and all too petty. The elements—the sun, the wind, the
water—are animated as independent forces, beyond simile or
metaphor. Words, too, are elemental, and the poet is present in the
landscape—"during these times / I searched for the letters / for
the perfect word." Boni affirms her desire for hope in the
face of ethno‑cultural and state violence although she acknowledges
that desiring to hope and hoping are not the same.