What God in the Kingdom of Bastards

Poems

These are poems possessed by influence—the shades of elders, both familial and literary, the spirits of language and history and home—but from these ghostly voices, Gyamfi has forged an oracular style all his own: searching, restless, and utterly radiant. What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a stunning, searing debut.

Peter Ho Davies, author A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence. Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead. Combining vivid imagery with fragmented, conversational tones of prayers, laments, and whispered confessions that are surreal and lyrical, Gyamfi delves into the ways trauma—both personal and systemic—permeates family, faith, and identity.

More Praise

'I was made in Kumasi, Ghana,' writes the poet. And indeed, Ghana is a durable touchstone in the metamorphic landscapes of these remarkable poems, where we are as likely to encounter a snowstorm in Manhattan or a garden in New Mexico as a barbershop in Accra, where a Pentecostal baptism and the memory of a childhood beating can structure generations of familial narrative. Gyamfi is a poet of rare mythic abundance; his imagination seems to have no limits.

Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

The imaginative force behind Brian Gyamfi’s What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is raw and electric, fusing myth, memory, theology, and sexuality with fearless originality. Gyamfi reshapes biblical and diasporic mythologies with irreverent reverence—sacred cosmology meets visceral absurdity. Here, faith becomes dance, disruption, and wound; theory becomes flesh. Grief, masculinity, and mental illness unfold through intimate, bodily metaphors: ‘Jesus at McDonalds,’ boys baptized in creeks, the smell of oranges in a casket. This is a breathtaking debut, a dizzily exhilarating and boundary-breaking poetics—at once grounded in dirt and soaring into the dream depths of mythology.

Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

September, 2025

isbn : 9780822967576

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / General

about the author

Brian Gyamfi is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship, and two Hopwood Awards. His libretto The Ants Are Illuminated was commissioned by Overtone Industries for their Original Vision opera. A finalist for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Poetry International Prize, his writing has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, Guernica, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry. Gyamfi lives in Washington, DC.

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