We are excited to be able to share the news that Otis Mensah’s new book ‘Safe Metamorphosis’ will be launched online tonight on Youtube at 7pm. Click here to view Otis’ youtube page.
We are thrilled to be working with Otis, including the commissioning of his poem “We Were Never Derelict” for our student scheme Beton House at Park Hill. This poem and another will make up part of the public artwork at Park Hill in Sheffield.
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.
