[09/17/26] Akintade-Oluwagbeye, Peace: The Goat's Tongue

The Goat’s Tongue is an interdisciplinary poetry collection that follows a girl, a goat, and an owl through the landscapes of vulnerability, belonging, memory, rejection, and forgiveness.

Rooted in Yoruba oral literature and born from Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye’s durational performance work Ori. Ara. Emi. (Ori. Ori. My Head), the collection moves between English and a symbolic language created by the author. Through poetry, folklore, performance, and visual script, Akintade-Oluwagbeye transforms a childhood memory of silence, dirt, goats, and isolation into a mythic inquiry into what it means to speak, to remember, and to become human.

Haunting, tender, and formally inventive, The Goat’s Tongue is a work of ancestral imagination and embodied poetics — a book about the hunger to belong, the pain of rejection, and the strange, sacred work of finding a voice.

Rooted in childhood memory, ancestral knowledge, and postcolonial questions of isolation and communication, The Goat’s Tongue bridges oral literature and the contemporary page, offering a haunting, intimate, and formally inventive work about the struggle to speak, the hunger for belonging, and the transformative power of poetry.