The Botsotso Jesters

The work of Botsotso Publishing continues to stretch the boundaries of the written form of poetry. In this . . . they experiment with collective writing, dialogue poems, and move even closer to the fusion of poetry and visual imagery. Dirty Washing boldly insists on the right to play the game of collaging with different voices and languages and to freely juxtapose words, phrases, stanzas and images, rubbing off meanings and colours against one another, as if to deliberately deny the possibility of coherence in the writing, or perhaps to mirror a fractured world. As a whole the book presents a sense of multiple voices, speaking together or separately, against a backdrop of urban decay, and in a post-Codesa South Africa.

The Botsotso Jesters are five sharply individual voices that have nevertheless begun to weave themselves into a qualitatively different kind of poetry. Dirty Washing is a book which doesn’t hide the loose ends of its effort, and this fact opens a space for others to play on the literary margins. - Donald Parenzee, Dirty Washing, 1999

Visit the The Botsotso Jesters Website: http://www.botsotso.org.za