What Remains After the Fire
by Maki Motapanyane

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To every woman who has endured what should have broken her. Time, that strange and tender animal, softened the sharpest edges. And I, weary of holding only the wound, began to turn the blade into a mirror. In What Remains After the Fire, Maki Motapanyane gently explores themes of rupture, survival, and the quiet work of reassembling the self, drawing on her personal experience to peel back the layers of time, memory, and healing for readers. Motapanyane's poems are not memoir, but they are true, gathered into four arcs: Wound, Return, Kin, and Sanctum. Each poem is shaped by Motapanyane’s life as a daughter, mother, survivor, and scholar, as she makes sense of the world from within its deep contradictions.

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Maki Motapanyane, Ph.D., has over two decades of academic engagement in feminist theory, cultural studies, and Black women’s intellectual traditions. She writes from both a scholarly background and her own lived experiences. This collection emerges from her history of trauma, memory, and healing. Motapanyane knows what it means to search for a language that can hold what is hard to name, and she offers that language to others with care and integrity. As an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, Motapanyane has published a significant number of academic works. This is her first book of poetry, though she is not new to the poetic form. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she spends her time as a writer, educator, and in active service in community engagement.

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Contributors

Author

Maki Motapanyane

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