Poetry
A Poet and His Nation in Flight
A poet and his nation in flight. First, the poet’s country, Uganda – an ill-fated Icarus – flew with delirium, overreached itself mid-flight, and plunged into the abyss of postcolonial chaos. The other, the poet – a reclaimed Icarus–is pulled into exile by the instinct for survival and escape from state victimhood. This is the […]
The New Anthology of Young African & African American Poetry
The relationship between Africa and African America has long been mediated through language, memory, rupture, and imaginative return towards home. Across the long history of the Black Atlantic, poetry has served as one of the most intimate vessels through which these crossings are felt, remembered, and reimagined. It is for this reason that Édouard Glissant […]
Poetics of the Abject in Adedayo Agarau’s The Years of Blood
In Adedayo Agarau’s new collection The Years of Blood, boundaries blur and collapse. Life bleeds into death. Self merges with the other. Ritual and violence collide. This collision produces what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, that which exists at the border of our identity, neither fully self nor other, neither clean nor unclean. Adedayo Agarau […]
Call for Poetry Anthology Contribution
Seasonality dictates the character of Canadian life, its tone, texture, and the pulses of its resilience. It tells its history ruthlessly and informs us of the roots of traditions that govern the north and its confluences. To imagine the seasonal life of Canadian is to come into its brutal history of settler colonialism and the […]
Pivotal Sophomores in Nigerian Poetry
Among the genres, poetry is still king in the Nigerian literary space. It might not be hyperbolic to say a poetry collection or chapbook is published every other month. Last month, Facebook informed me of Bakandamiya: An Elegy, a new poetry volume by Sadiq Dzukogi. This month (December 2025) is the turn of Tares Uburumu’s […]
On Lineage and Voice
On a humid afternoon, after a few years back from Germany, in our house in Nigeria, where my childhood had its formative years, I found a book lying on our dining table. Its cover showed a pair of drumming hands, brown against the dim yellow and blue of the jacket, and just beneath them, my […]
child of my mother
after Nikki Giovanni’s “resignation” (for you, you, & you)i love you because our mothers say nothing is more worse than eating alone so we eat iyán & ègúsí from the same bowl brotherman you who would wrestle a blue whale for my sake i love you because of all the steep mountains & the hills […]
Does the Body Ever Get Familiar with Grief?
–For Oby, Albert, Quadri, and everyone who left us too early Does the body ever get familiar with grief?This sinking, this drowningGoing underwater and unable to find an anchor Does one ever get used to sorrow?The smile on the face of a strangerThe singsong laughter of a passer-byA look that reminds of exactlyHow much you loved life Is there […]
Outside Borders
Everytime I arrive here,The leaves are in bloom, their wrinkled skins blown south, then east,Until it lands bare. I find it strange,How my heart races with this placeGoosebumps crawl over me,My mind falls with the brown rain of a tree Ending itself. I cannot find home. Every arrival is a gongKnocked hard. Every fondness of […]
Agema and The Writer as a Repository of Memory
E. E. Sule, the renowned writer, critic, and scholar, in his instructive keynote address titled “BM Dzukogi as an Archive: Literature, Activism and Mentorship,” delivered at the national literary colloquium in honour of BM Dzukogi’s 60th birthday celebration in Minna, in January 2025, postulated that the “Nigerian writer must necessarily be an activist. Given the […]