Isabella Motadinyane
Complete Poems is Isabella Motadinyane’s collected work: just over 30 poems. It was first published as Bella in 2007 by Botsotso Publishing in an illustrated edition, and was republished by Deep South without illustrations. The six Sesotho poems and the Sesotho phrases scattered in other poems were newly translated by Lesego Rampolokeng.
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Reading Isabella Motadinyane’s collected poems feels like more than holding a gem in your hands. It feels like tasting the vibrant-wounded-hopeful, s’camtho mesh of Jo’burg in the 90s […] They introduce the reader to the many voices that are Isabella: a fiery funny woman from Soweto who could hold her own in male-dominated spaces, and a fragile feminine woman who refused to allow her own physical ailments to break her […] This book of collected poems is a beautiful tribute to an otherwise forgotten South African voice. And to an important vibrant time in the history of South African literature, before the wave of Def Poetry and slam Americanism influences.
– Vangile Gantsho, New Coin
