Poetry, politics, madness, and desire collide in the true story of Ingrid Jonker, the woman hailed as South Africa’s Sylvia Plath. In his first speech to the South African Parliament Nelson Mandela read her poem “The Dead Child of Nyanga.” The story begins in Cape Town in the 1960s where apartheid had eliminated free expression for both blacks and whites. There Jonker finds her freedom writing verse while moving through a series of stormy affairs. Amid escalating fights with both her lovers and her father who is a government censor, the poet witnesses unconscionable events that alter her life forever.
