In When the Fires Go Down, Lesego Rampolokeng writes in the tense after the blaze: the hour of smoke, residue, reckoning, and the dangerous darkness that follows. The title itself carries both foreboding and aftermath—what happens when the flames drop, and what still burns underneath. Across these acute, fiery, unflinching litanies, Rampolokeng brings a relentless gaze to body, history, language, and nation, moving with precision, urgency, and a ferocious musical intelligence. The poems surge from dense, jazz-charged freedom sonics and black radical invocation into historical re-enactment, social-media derangement and repurposing, and hard street-level tribute—to Orlando West, its wounds, its styles, its unfinished struggles, a microcosm of what’s been, what is and what’s to come.
Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, this is a book of conjuring and confrontation: incantatory, improvisatory, and alive with ecstatic wordplay, where high theory and low vernacular collide, where freedom is sung and interrogated, where memory returns as rhythm, scar, and prophecy. Here, Rampolokeng writes from both sides of the tracks at once—A-side and B-side, inside and outside—holding us in that crux until the mirror cracks and history speaks back.
"If there was any doubt about Lesego Rampolokeng’s important place in the literary history and trajectory of this country, the prophetic power and poetic pyrotechnics of his latest offering should be enough to suffocate such spirit of uncertainty for good." Unathi Slasha, author of the novels, Jah Hills and The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies.
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