‘The tactile language and eclectic techniques take the breath away, with the book featuring playlets, remixes of quotes from Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, even a poem layered on to a reproduction of a fragment of a genome. Imaginative, rigorous and playful, this is a showstopper of a debut.’ – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian, on Monster

‘Benson's debut explores the Black female body as both a site of oppression and resilience. Anchored by poems on Sarah Baartman’s life, Monster presents Benson’s own experiences with lyricism, Ewe mythology, and Shakespearean echoes.’ – Brittle Paper (100 Notable African Books of 2024)

‘“One language is never enough”, Dzifa Benson writes in the first section of Monster, her capacious debut collection. That opening sequence orbits around Sarah Baartman, a Khoekhoe South African woman who was toured around Europe in the 19th century as an object of curiosity, known as the “Hottentot Venus”. In Monster, Benson looks to bring both Baartman and her milieu to life, evoking a chorus of voices to demonstrate the bodily horror, racism and misogyny which surrounded her treatment and celebrity. Benson is sharp on what it means to have a body. She shows bodily animalness, its flesh, as well as the weight – literal and figurative – of gaining notoriety for having one. […] She takes a maximalist approach: her variety of formal approaches culminating in something of a hall-of-mirrors effect, with language extracted from contemporary newspapers, the sounds of publicists, defenders and exploiters of Baartman. Then there are poems written in the voice of Baartman herself: a mix of Khoekhoe dialect words and euphonic, often musical, phrasing.’ – Declan Ryan, The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month for October)

'For the multimedia poet and dramatist Dzifa Benson, Baartman and her story are central among the minds, bodies and cultures she examines in her first collection, Monster. The impressive title sequence demonstrates how biography can be transformed into poetry without sacrifice either of poetry or realism.' – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian

'These are the most brilliant and accomplished poems I have read in many years. This is what truly great poetry is about. In Dzifa Benson’s poems something that seemed lost is now found, the familiar becomes strange again and we’re guided through a wilderness that blossoms before our eyes as the poet strikes rock after rock of ancestral grief and crystalline revelations stream forth.' - Lorna Goodison

'It is this clarity of knowing that gives these words their inimitable heft, I feel. That allows one a clarity of watching one’s species, even one’s body. My evidence? Here: “This body is an underwater cave whose lungs I cannot drain while I wait for air to become breath.” It is fascinating, indeed, to follow the Benson poem, whether the poem is playful or serious – or often both, at once! – there is a kind of knowing that’s always unexpected in its unfolding, and always welcome. I love this poet’s work.' – Ilya Kaminsky

'This is an amazing collection, not only for a debut but for a poet at any stage. It’s versatile and virtuosic, experimental and moving, complex and culturally important.' – Bernardine Evaristo

'Dzifa Benson’s collection is so many things, a careful unfurling and retelling of the story of Saartjie Baartman; deeply penetrating as it is intelligent as it is compassionate…the pages in this book contain a carefully controlled rage allied to an attention to language, form and music. This debut announces a vital new voice; Dzifa Benson is a brilliantly original poet who refuses to turn away, who resolves to commit to write into the pain and horrors of our buried histories. This is an exceptional debut.' – Mona Arshi

'Monster is the most alive book I’ve read, it makes me cry, laugh and rage. Dzifa Benson is a genius, she brings to light the suffering and defiance of the Hottentot Venus, the richness of Ewe culture, and neglected paintings of Black men, with verve, erudition, and a Shakespearean vibrancy. This is an extraordinary debut, its themes are major and urgent: the decolonisation of the mind, and the empowering of the female Black body in European culture that historically has devalued it. The result is an explosive and original masterwork.' – Pascale Petit

'The language of Dzifa Benson’s poetic universe is bodily & boldly made: sonic, potent and kickingly alive.' – Tishani Doshi

'British-Ghanaian poet Benson’s history of Sarah Baartman gives Baartman a voice and some agency within the constraints of her terrible abduction and exploitation. This is, in the words of the publisher, “a bold and lyrical exploration of the Black female body as a site of oppression and resistance".’ – Jacqueline Nyathi, The Continent (The Year in Books)

‘Benson’s debut is set to be a heady and visionary experience.’ – Chris McCabe, National poetry librarian, Southbank Centre National Poetry Library, The Bookseller

‘Poems exploring injustice, identity and joy allow Benson’s lyrical prose and innovative structure to pull readers into a world that reflects the author’s experience as a Black woman born in London and raised in Ghana. Confronting themes of race, gender, and the monstrous in society, this poetry collection is both visceral and mythological, imagining the life of Sarah Baartman, a South African Khoikhoi woman displayed in freak shows in 19th century Europe. It packs an almighty punch.’ – Chaya Colman and Sophie Ezra, Glamour (25 best new books of October 2024)

‘Dzifa Benson’s impressive Monster (Bloodaxe) finds belated justice for the “Hottentot Venus” Sarah Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman brought to 19th-century London and displayed as a curiosity.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (The best poetry books of 2024)

'This devastatingly strong, tender and complex debut features an unflinching study of Sarah Baartman - a South African Khoikhoi woman displayed in "freak" shows in 19th century Europe. Benson refracts "monstrosity" into something beyond words: something that scrapes, interrogates, and humbles. With moving emotional heft and stark storytelling, Benson explores Black female subjectivity and the tension between the brutal and poignant. This is a hypnotic book which makes you feel uncomfortable, the way all good poetry should.' – Shalini Sengupta, Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin 2024

‘Benson’s debut collection Monster, in part a biography of Sarah Baartman in poetry form, rather than treating her as a symbol, gives a vividly personal first-person perspective to a woman often only spoken about by a world which has denied her personhood. […] Monster is brave not only in subject matter but in method. […] Monster is not only beautifully crafted and fearless, but necessary.’ – The Saartjie Journal

‘Benson’s Monster interrogates historical discourse about the black female body – the case of Baartman being a harrowing yet presently familiar example of the dehumanisation of black women. Monster also examines how displacement and othering shape a fractured sense of belonging, forcing individuals to navigate spaces where they are both hypervisible and unseen. […] By conjuring a voice for Sarah, Benson grants her agency, so that she might be not merely a historical figure but also a presence in contemporary consciousness.’ – Thembe Mvula, Poetry London

‘Forms and voices abound and rebound, reverberate and ricochet in Dzifa Benson's paradigm-shifting debut collection. Monster is as dazzling as it is intimidating, as fearful as it is wondrous.’ – Aoife Lyall, Magma

Dzifa Benson was born in London to Ghanaian parents and grew up in Ghana, Nigeria and Togo. She is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose work intersects science, art, technology, the body and ritual which she explores through poetry, prose, theatre, libretto, performance, curation, visual arts, immersive technologies, essays and criticism. She holds a Masters degree in Text & Performance from RADA and Birkbeck in London, and studied dramaturgy at the the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. She was shortlisted for the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021. Her first collection, Monster, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2024. Her abridgement and adaption of the National Youth Theatre REP Company’s 2021 production of Othello, in collaboration with Olivier award-winning director Miranda Cromwell, toured the UK and she is currently in the pre-production, dramaturgical stage of her first full length play Black Mozart // White Chevalier.

I. Monster
13 Lacuna, with Landscape
14 Blues for Sarah
16 Exhibition of a Real Life Wonder (Still Alive!)
17 Som-|aub // Menarche
20 Lost & Found
22 In Which Comedian Charles Matthews, Actor Charles Kemble and Dandy Beau Brummell Question Miss Sara Baartman Before Her Evening Performance
26 From The Morning Chronicle, 12 October 1810 p.3
28 The Attorney General’s Submission to the King’s Bench
30 Miss Sarah Bartmann Recalls Her Lover, a Drummer from Batavia
32 Freak Sonnets for Lusus Naturae at Bartholomew Fair: Natural-Born, Man-Made and Counterfeit
36 Tongue
40 The Prime of Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Cuvier Witnessed by the Recently Made Ghost of Mademoiselle Sarah Baartman
42 Scala Naturae // A Remix of Voltaire
43 Sestina for Six Scientists in Search of an Ology
45 A Psychological Study of Phenomena // A Remix of Ribot
46 Bottom Power
49 Mademoiselle Sarah Bartmann Performs in Duchess du Barry’s Salon of Wit and Wisdom
50 Bottom Power Redux // Augmented with Bustle (A Poem/Play)
54 How to Restore a Museum Artefact
55 1810–2002
58 Bone Fever Dream
60 Gemsbok Trance Song of the Girl Who Made the Stars Road
61 The Hottentot Venus Hails Botticelli’s on the High Seas
63 !Nau // A Bloodline of Inessential Contact with Water 

II. Mɔse ƒe ye nye xɔme
78 Echolalia // A Broken Rule Ghazal
79 Ahanonko // ‘A Nameless Thing is a Vague Thing’
80 Ŋkɔfofodo // Moulding My Drinking Name
82 The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale
83 Venaviwo // Xi and Xetsa
85 Myself, When I Am Real
86 Dzonu // Fire Things: A Brief Genealogy of the XX Chromosomes
87 Futhawo // Rowing Song for Asie Me Tsia Dio ‘Young Boys’ Fishermen
89 Complaint to a Flamboyant
90 Viheheɖego // Self Portrait as a Creature of Numbers

III. After a Panoptic Ekphrasis
93 Three Colours Black
94 The Red Thread
95 In the Company of Trees
96 Foreign Matter
99 Broken Ghazal for Pink Sheen and Gravity
100 Call Me Balthazar
102 Black Dog Bone Blues
103 The $40,000 Pill
105 Coitus, Refracted
106 London Bone

IV. Addendum
111 The Yoctogram Weighs In
112 Here, This Bird
113 Little Wing
114 Truss
115 How to Wear Drama
116 Mountain Myths of the Orchid Lady’s Daughter
117 The Last Exorcist
119 How I Learned to Dance with the Octopus
120 I Told It to the Sea
125 Raft

127  Notes
132 Acknowledgements