Ernest N. Emenyonu, ed. ALT 42: Oral and Written African Poetry and Poetics. Boydell & Brewer, 2024. 242 pp. Endnotes. $36.95. Paperback. ISBN: 9781847014153.

Today (ALT 42), is, in summary, an ode to the poet as griot and medium.Ernest Emenyonu compiles a collection of scholarly and literary tributes that reaffirm the poet's centrality in representing African experiences in the contemporary era.In Emenyonu's editorial chapter and introduction, he makes it clear that the intention of this volume of African Literature Today is to foreground "continuities in the practice of the art of poetry in the continent" (3).This impressive volume, comprising scholarly articles, interviews, tributes, poems, short stories, and reviews, manages to assert such continuities that affix the role of the poet as a figure that mirrors burning social and political questions across African nationspaces.Major themes explored include, but are not limited to, the centrality of African-Indigenous spiritual practices and ways of knowing, orality, and contemporary African poetry, as well as poetry as a militant art form.Following the griot line of enquiry, contributors address themes of African and Afrocentric spiritualities, widely discussing how poets, as artists, mediate between the organic and inorganic worlds.This is explored adeptly in Ogaga Okuyade and Edafe Mukoro's essays on pandemic poetry (21), Iquo DianaAbasi's reflections on water, movement, and Yoruba cosmology (50), as well as Adetayo Alabi's writing on Ork Praise Poetry, for instance (75).These works address the position of the poet as a mediator, who translates in true griot form the incommunicable, whether it be between the human and spirit worlds or in the molecular.In this way, ALT 42 succeeds in restating the place of poetry and, indeed, the poet as a soothsayer of sorts, who illuminates the extraphysical and ancestral bonds that tie African and Afro-diasporic communities.Further to the point of the poet as a griot-mediator, ALT 42 situates poetry as derivative and reproductive of a metamorphosing oral tradition.Across the thematically varied contributions in this volume, it was refreshing to engage with explorations of the poetic form that reimagined the contemporary relevance of African oral traditions.For instance, Milena Vladi Jovanov's discussion of the body of work of T.S. Eliot and Kofi Anyidoho (59), Paramitha Routh Roy's exploration of Spoken Word Poetry and the African Oral Tradition (106), and Mawuli Adjei's review of Kofi Anyidoho's SeedTIME (211) do not rely on static descriptions of African oral traditions.Instead, there is an emphasis on the evolving nature of orality that allowed oral and aural practices to remain relevant to African lived realities.These reflections explore the roles of memory, cultural inheritance, technology, and media in shaping oral practices within