A review of Hybrid Heaven by Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

Hybrid Heaven
& other(ed) poems
By Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss
Recent Work Press
May 2026, ISBN: 9781764106894, Paperback, 88 pages

Hybrid Heaven is more polyhybrid than hybrid. Like much of Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss’ work, it moves across disciplines, cultures, identities, genres, and styles to create poetry that is distinctive and striking. The poems engages with memoir, African mythology, music, migration, colonisation, and perhaps above all, the role that language has to play, both in creating and unmaking the cultural constructs that frame our lives. There is much play in these poems which blend references from literature and mythology with politics, music and history with linguistic virtuoso:

Mad hatters on a mercurial rise
Listening to two sevens clash with Jimmy Jazz
Black Panthers pouncing podiums
on the prowl, whiskers erect for messages
buried in the concrete jungle treasure, their project
extends from the Bronx to Brixton to Brazzaville
I met these tailors, in the ghetto next to Malcolm X
camouflaged in Lumumba & Mobutu leopard hats

The opening piece, “At the Polo”, feels at first like Poland, but it soon becomes clear that the poem is set in the Polish-Australian White Eagle Club in Canberra, with Pierogi and folk-art cross stitch, Polish drinks and the endless thirst of university students celebrating the power of what comes from bringing different cultures together. The chimera is more than the sum of its parts. The poem feels almost hallucinatory in its exuberance:

Gilded armour glints
in the forest darkening
Wojtek, a bear & soldiers dance
as troops advance
to shift bordering thoughts

Several of the poems are set in Moss’ current home of Canberra, moving from the Old Canberra Inn to roads connecting the suburbs with the city (another hybrid). The pieces usually begin with close observation but have an expansionary quality, encompassing historical and political awareness. In “Freewheel (Kaleen to the City)”, the passing of time is also incorporated with imagery seen from the handlebars of a bicycle in motion:

Follow the pleats of APS officers and Gen Z
tadpoles and grey nomads breathe
as we escape into concrete green canopy
Now its public housing chic, Crispin’s dingoes
bark past the scarred trees & tent embassy

In addition to Canberra, there are a  variety of settings, Leura in the Blue Mountains, Tasmania and Goulburn, depicted in snippets of memoir as a redneck place of prejudice:

In Surveillance Capital Country
an abattoir of artifice flexes industrial
muscle, its rib cage incarcerates
as genetic memory falters under lie detection
Natives in DNA corroding chains
On the precipice of Rocky hillbilly recollection
Welcome to the first inland city (“Inland City”)

The observations here are vivid and direct, undercut with an awareness of the many unseen layers: what has been stolen, what has been lost, and where, amidst the everyday noise, there are terrible silences:

I walk through the bubble
& chatter of Salamanca
Save the Tassie diablo plushies
blush, the rush for rediscovery
The thylacine –
But where are the aborigines?

The poems are also global, moving from Ghana in West Africa to England, picking up on Moss’ Anglo-Ghanaian heritage and his multiple residences, and exploring practices like Kitsugi, the Japanese art of visible mending, and Kente, Ghanan weaving, Throughout Hybrid Heaven there is celebration of the “mishmash” or “rainbow contusion” – “Encounter, contact, interact, exchange”. However you view it, migrants provide a source of enrichment, from the Polish club that opens the book to an Eritrean taxi driver in Melbourne, a Hellenic-Aussie overheard in Leura, the conjunction of Iraqi pistachios, Somali tea, and spinning dreidels in London, or Harris Park, Sydney’s “Little India”:

in Dharmachakra overtures
Lotus floating inner peace
Law’s wheel unmoved in the pond
In verdant sea spread diaspora seeds (“At Harris Park”)

At times, the images are linked sonically rather than semantically, with poetry driven forward through sibilance, alliteration, off-rhymes like “jeans” and “bloodstream”, or the kind of rhythmic echoes that encourage a slightly-breathless oral rendition:

Unironic post-Cobain saviours sin
Lads flounder in flannel, jeans (af)fray R(.)I(.)P
Pain killed to enter nirvana bloodstream
by ice pipe, opiate & cannabis gateways
plaid out in chequered patterns of dysfunction (“Nightclub Sirens”)

Music is everywhere throughout the book. It isn’t just the innate musicality of Moss’ language, or the hip-hop rhythms of the work, but more directly through a broad range of musical referents from Brazzaville Afrobeats to punk, ska, reggae, Hendrix’s psychedelic R&B to Nirvana’s grunge.  There is even a poem for the genre-blending Ghanaian-Australian musician Genesis Owusu.  These references blend smoothly into poems that explore sound and language with a great deal of wordplay including lots of multi-hyphenated words like “Road-train-metallic-camel-caravan”, local dialect, and indigenous languages like Taino and Arawak which also bring in their own cultural resonance and trauma. Though the work takes on a serious terrain, there is a lot of humour around the linguistic play, for example, the pastiche of nutritional buzzwords in “Raw & Wild”:

Hashtag new hybrids, plant powered by biofuel
Who breathe in the oil seed rape of the masses
Produce slaves bound to gut friendly lifestyles

Or the clever dad jokes in “Phrases from Dad”:

Skinheads on rafts (baked beans in the ‘80s)
More grease to the elbow (keep on going)
Canteen medals (you’ve dropped food on your top)

The levity is tempered by the poem’s parallel with the racist “Phrases on the Wall” that follows. However, the title poem  comes next, in some ways providing the heartwood of the book, and it feels like something of an answer: “Dreads tucked in/Galápagos baker boy hats, together/We enter hybrid heaven”. Embracing the multiple facets of all of our identities and rejecting notions of rigid binaries is the only way forward.

The book ends with “Planetary Bio (me)”, a terrific bio that further enhances the notion that not only is Moss himself a person who contains multitudes, but that perhaps the world would be a better, richer place if we all viewed ourselves in this polyhybrid way:

I’m an unapologetic haibun
hybrid-syncretic lyrical individual part of collective genetic memory,
prose poet cup twice full, magic mulatto, every ready Duracell, Brer
Rabbit plantation tactician shattering shackles, shapeshifting Anansi
spanning Ghana, Japan, the UK and Australia in short circuitry.

Hybrid Heaven is a powerful message delivered with great verve.