Do not speak as humans do. Speak like a poet.
Metatron is thrilled to announce the forthcoming publication of The Goat’s Tongue, a singular new collection by Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye, winner of the International Metatron Poetry Prize.
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A girl, a goat, and an owl move through a world governed by memory, silence, hunger, and transformation.
What begins in the charged terrain of childhood expands into something stranger: a fable, a ritual, a linguistic experiment, and a book of poetry unlike anything we have encountered before.
Following its figures across a rich interior landscape of exile, inherited silence, failed belonging, and the dangerous work of becoming legible to oneself, The Goat’s Tongue asks what happens when the language available to us can no longer hold what we know.
And what must be invented in its place.
Rooted in Yoruba oral literature and emerging from Akintade-Oluwagbeye’s durational performance practice, the collection moves between poetry, folklore, visual script, and symbolic language. Its pages form a world with its own logic: intimate yet mythic, playful yet severe, tender yet unwilling to look away.
This is a book about the need to speak—and the risk of being heard.
It is also a book about animals, ancestors, lost meanings, and the strange forms a voice may take when ordinary language has failed.
Early readers have described The Goat’s Tongue as feral, enchanting, visceral, and wholly original. Precious Okoyomon calls the work “so feral and hungry,” while Alasdair Rees praises its unfolding symbolic language and its transformation of the poetry collection into “a fable, a bildungsroman, and a linguistic treatise.”
For Metatron, The Goat’s Tongue represents precisely the kind of work the International Metatron Poetry Prize was created to champion: formally fearless, spiritually alive, and impossible to separate from the artist who made it.
Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye is an African-Canadian interdisciplinary poet, oral historian, choruspoem playwright, and the 11th Saskatchewan Poet Laureate. Organically from Yorubaland, Nigeria, and based in Saskatoon, their work brings together folklore, abstract riddles, Òwe Yorùbá, theatre, performance, and collective storytelling.
They are the author of Earth Skin, Equanimity in Sonder, Equanimity in Conversation, and The Taste of Sonder. Their poetry-plays include Madness with Rocks, Painted Elephant, I Who I Am, and First Let Me Breathe. They are also a recipient of the RBC SaskArts Emerging Artist Award and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal.
With The Goat’s Tongue, Akintade-Oluwagbeye offers a book that does not ask to be understood all at once. It asks to be entered.
Follow the girl.
Listen for the owl.
Do not turn your back on the goat.
The Goat’s Tongue will be published by Metatron in Fall 2027. Preorders are available now.
