As you will know from last weeks post on poetry commissions Alumno have been working with Otis Mensah, the Poet Laureate of Sheffield. We are excited to be able to share the news that Otis` new book “Safe Metamorphosis” will be launched on-line on 15 June. Maybe it is a fitting date as the country hopefully safely opens up a little more on that date too.

Otis` publishers Prototype have kindly given us a little more background on the book below :

Safe Metamorphosis is the debut poetry collection from Hip-Hop artist and spoken word poet Otis Mensah, Sheffield’s first Poet Laureate.

Mensah’s work challenges dominant modes of masculinity, and disrupts the elitism of poetry through its accessible, honest, raw and intimate language and rhythms. Free from the constraints of convention, Mensah writes in his own, unique voice, layered with rhythm and surreal imagery, unified by its fearless commitment to emotional honesty and its openness about the power and cost of creativity.

Safe Metamorphosis explores the transformations experienced in everyday life and the unspoken traumas caused by the uprooting of self as we are thrusted from one identity-building state to another. The poems explore metamorphoses at different points of our journey into adulthood, addressing the ways in which the associated upheaval of change and lost identity alters our sense of self and relationships with others.

For Mensah, poetry and Hip-Hop are a stimulus for philosophical reflection and introspection, and the poems in Safe Metamorphosis welcome us into the imaginative and highly observant mind of an artist committed to the healing and unifying power of communication.