XamissaXamissa is a book length poem that sounds out the city of Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the city of alternate takes. Xamissa adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships camethe X of the title standing in for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant. A work of documentary