Susanna L. Sacks. Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry. Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024. 215 pp. Notes. Index. $99.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781625347688.

The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry explores critically the pivotal roles played by social media platforms in the shaping of contemporary anglophone poetry.Focusing on anglophone poetry from Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, Sacks argues that the digital world branches into other spaces that contribute to our collective understanding of its functionalities, aesthetics, and the continuous interrogation of poetic representation in the digital age.She reflects on how performance poetry, slam poetry, hashtags, chants, WhatsApp groups, and so on are instrumental to the production of publics and agencies that inform both the digital space and the offline space.Discussing the propagation of poetry in the popular sphere and elite space, Sacks's critical intervention foregrounds institutional supports in the promotion of poetry and the function of algorithms in the evaluation of digital poetry.She shows how digital poetry and platforms are youth-driven-especially in the African countries examined in the book.Divided into five chapters, each chapter is anchored by the critical responses to anglophone poetry and its digital networks.In the first chapter, Sacks interrogates the place of hashtags, poetry, and chants in the digital publics.She engages how "hashtagged and hashtaggable communications extend bodily action from street to screen and, crucially, back to the street" (23).Here, Sacks renders aptly the movement from the digital space to the street.This shift or movement from the digital space to the street validates the impact of hashtag, poetry, and chants in a local or global discourse.It acknowledges their potency to mediate or frame communication on social media platforms before leading to grounded action in the street.The second chapter attends to the aesthetics of digital networks and their affective tendency on literary forms in South Africa, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.Citing digital platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube as sites of digital networks and affordances, Sacks examines how the strength of digital networks affects digital platforms and the works shared on these platforms.She explores the effects of digital algorithm on contemporary literary networks and how this controls the visibility and virality of the work shared online.The third chapter explores slam poetry/spoken word poetry across regional networks.Sacks addresses its transmission across virtual and grounded spaces, and how audience participation and institutional funding also shape spoken word poetry and its sustainability.For example, a poem shared online can be