TELEPATH
“In TELEPATH, Akua Lezli Hope maps the electric meridians of the unspoken, tracing a "wordless knowing" that hums within the blood long before a phone rings or a mouth opens. There is a deep, startling intelligence in these poems, a clarity that looks straight into the eyes of the world and wins. With a quiet, vulnerable beauty, Hope’s language acts as a solar flare in the mind’s atmosphere, illuminating the ancestral oneness we nearly forgot. A stunning, visionary work.”
- Sheree Renée Thomas, multi-award winning author of The Tongue I Dream In, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
“With “TELEPATH” we see a grandmaster of speculative poetry firmly in her element, providing an excellent introduction to her technique and literary priorities that are at once compelling, personal and deeply imaginative. Each line and turn of phrase is fine-tuned to launch you across an epic trajectory of the outermost boundaries of language and perception, managing to look internally and externally at once. From pieces like "First Contact" and "My mother she ate me" to her closing poem "T-Stroll" Akua Lezli Hope adds a wonderful set of poems to the world sure to inspire and delight the curious reader.”
- Bryan Thao Worra, Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association President (2016-2022)
“Hope transmits a poetic philosophical explosion for the sixth sense. TELEPATH takes us on a trip from birth to the outer reaches of the cosmos to New York, and through dimensions only visible to those who look with the third eye. Hope’s words are music transferred from mind to mind, so open up and receive.”
- Jean-Paul L. Garnier, owner of Space Cowboy Books, Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain Magazine
“In award-winning poet Akua Lezli Hope’s speculative collection, TELEPATH, we are transported inside what it is to experience others' emotions, thoughts, as well as communication between telepaths. Akua’s poems give a kaleidoscope of views on having an ability that can be used to gain and lose relationships, identity, money or to be a telepath enslaved who may not know the language being spoken, but has a deep knowing of the slaver’s intention. We can imagine how it feels to know the difference between what is said and the truth inside a person. A variety of poetry forms gracefully move words on the page, carrying us through the challenges of a gift that can bring maddening loneliness or wonderful companionship. I was fascinated by the idea of us all being telepaths, once upon a time.”
-Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master
https://tinyurl.com/TELEPATHBOOK
ABOUT TELEPATH
TELEPATH
by
Akua Lezli Hope
Gnashing Teeth Publishing
6X9 82 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966075-20-2
April 21, 2026
TELEPATH by Akua Lezli Hope. ISBN: 978-1-966075-20-2. Pages: 82. Size: 6×9. Publication Date: April 21, 2026. Telepath by Akua Lezli Hope.
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https://gnashingteethpublishing.com/product/telepath-by-akua-lezli-hope/
TELEPATH explores the unnamed in Black American experience, an aspect of being that often goes unacknowledged, an area either ignored or taken for granted, in the realm of so-called extra/sensory perception.
When such experience is an integral part of life, it is not seen as a separate or even extra ability. Much of mainstream media and reportage separates this capability by confining perception to that which is measurable, or observed by external others.
This realm of experience and understanding, unrecognized by the overculture, misunderstood and maligned by the mainstream, is the realm that Telepath's poems inhabit.
TELEPATH explores life experiences from the perspective of those who retain, accept and have integrated this named mindskill: reading others' thoughts and empathy.
While this is called telepathy, it touches on, and perhaps includes the readily named, identified and overtly experienced senses.
Our named senses number more than five and include certain personal internalities and specificities, like feeling pressure or balance. When we consider touch, one could say something feels smooth or hard, but what is name for the feeling of gravity on one's body or lack of it: gravity. When we enter water there are feelings that are more than wet and other than temperature that we experience.
So TELEPATH examines the limitations of using and having information, that such a capability is not enough. Knowing that someone intends to harm or kill you is only useful in preventing their actions if you can perceive these at a distance. Telepathy is a communication and not a prediction, an insight.
About the Author
Akua Lezli Hope is a paraplegic creator of poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, & adornments. In print since 1974 with over 500 poems published, her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer's Digest Book Award), THEM GONE, & Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (Elgin Award). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include NEA & NYFA fellowships; SFPA, Rhysling & IGNYTE awards; NYSCA grants for Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry; disability poetics and divination poetry. She created the Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series & edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the first of its kind. She is a Grandmaster of Fantastic Poetry.