"Utilizing a variety of forms from abecedarian to sonnet, crisscrossing the globe from the island of Lampedusa to Atlanta’s Centennial Park bombings, Ajibola Tolase’s poems are evocative, a calling forth of the voices and experiences of the disenfranchised, the lost, the lonely. The poems are sure-footed in their wailing. I was all in from the first poem when I was told 'it does not vex me that dead men [walk] through my poems.' Read this collection to learn the why of it and what it means." —Lynne Thompson, Cave Canem Prize judge, Los Angeles poet laureate, and author of Fretwork

“Yes, there is a villanelle and sonnets flanked by abcedarians, but it’s the percussive vernacular that guides me through Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks. It’s the revelrous, ‘If everyone celebrated / what didn’t kill them, we can pretend / to be immortals’ and the irreverent ‘I would have hugged him / until he felt shame’ that sings to me. Be it the tongue’s many failings, absence, migration, Tolase has created a world I'll trumpet for years to come.” —Clemonce Heard, author of Tragic City

“‘Imagine / the land without the conflicts,’ writes Ajibola Tolase in his blazing debut, 2000 Blacks. From Nigeria to America, Tolase explores the surrealness that arises from living in repressive spaces. Yet despite the violence embedded in systems of power, ‘the native word for burn is the same as dance.’ This is a necessary poetry that leaves no quarter unsinged, a revelation in its willingness to dwell in the unimaginable.” —Quan Barry, author of Auction