“Silent, sacred, roaming.”

Ms. Magazine, on "The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026"

“The balancing lines of these poems are sinuous in their beckoning to places where you can swear under the ‘glabrous moon . . .you’d hear the sugarcane grow’ and are inhabited by a rich tapestry, drawing us deeply into Kandé’s histories and, ultimately, the human connectivity of love and loss we all share.”

World Literature Today

“In these poems, violence is overt or hidden but ever present. Kandé is showing us that gestures carry undercurrents of meaning. Whether recalling a ceremony for the passing of loved ones or the remembrance Waof childhood, her poems call attention to body language and how we speak to one another without words even when all we have ‘left are crumbs/like the ones after a meal/you swipe away with a sponge’. . . . [Gestuary] breathes life into gestures overlooked by the unaffected and elevates them into the spiritual.”

Washington Unbound