Winner, 2022 International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry.

In a world barely beginning to recognize itself as dazzlingly multihued, the erupting ecocide is teaching that while no accounting of complexity is complete, change is true and the sky, singular.

We are of parts fundamentally interconnected and overlapping.

If we choose it, this overlapping can become a continuum. A continuum of movement combined with still-ness, individuality reaching for the whole, loss and surrender, abandon and opening.

And of falling: an ever-falling, toward the intensive care that is love.

Salimah ValianiI is a poet, activist, and researcher. Born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, of a Ugandan mother and Tanzanian father, like her parents, Salimah left home in her late teenage years and began a journey of study and work that included extended stays in Montreal, Quebec; London (UK); New York City and Binghamton (USA); Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario; and Cape Town, South Africa. She has published four collections of poetry: breathing for breadth (2005);

Letter Out: Letter In (2009); Land of the Sky (2016); and Cradles (2017). Her latest publication is the poem-story," Dear South Africa," one of seven pieces in Praxis Magazine's 2019-2020 Chapbook Series. Check out her work online at: https://www.facebook.com/SalimahValianiPoet.

Salimah Valiani's profile page

"Valiani's words vibrate with a keen awareness of love as a force of rupture/rapture/way of navigating through the crises of capitalism/climate and the multiform/ever-present nature of colonial "pasts," should love be what leads the way as we embark on journeys across the globe that are continually "rebeginning." 29 leads to love is a book that is part radical map, part kinetic geography of the body, but also "part there / part here / part beyond."
-Adebe DeRango-Adem, author of Terra Incognita

"Salimah Valiani's 29 leads to love is an paean to love that is political, transformative and global. Her words--precise, evocative and justice-seeking--take us to streets of New Delhi, Mexico, Johannesburg, and Manila, showing and teaching us that love is more than what we can imagine."
-Farzana Doctor, author of SEVEN