Review/Criticism

 If his debut collection, Where the Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, enacts place-centric imagination and diasporic consciousness, James Yeku’s latest work, A Phial of Passing Memories, articulates further “memoir-poetic” narratives in 60 poems coordinated in five sections that detail diverse encounters in moments and places. His poetry picks on well-ranged, everyday experiences: birth, parenting, death, […]

See, I’m full of the blues, holy water too – Preacher Boy At the time of death, legendary Delta blues musician, Robert Johnson, was only 27. He had disappeared quietly, so quiet that the world did not hear a word about it until nearly three decades later, when a researcher stumbled upon his death certificate […]

There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other people’s stories. Mohamed Mbougar […]

“The work itself is a study in how the ideology of the novel works, I think.”  —Akin Adeṣọkan, 2013.  Chief Isaac Delano was one of the most important Yorùbá writers of the 20th century. The ‘Chief’ in his title and the spelling of his surname “Delano” may carry American echoes but they are emphatically African. […]