Poetry
Two Poems
Somewhere in BornoIit lingers, the sorrow, like a mist as men sit on benches with tumblers of ginin hands, smoke from bummed cigars drifting aboutthe atmosphere—the only mechanismmy countrymen have invented to disembody ache.IIa foreigner once asked why the children herewear old faces: i told him to wear his caution perfectly well. the bullets don’t […]
Gratitude for Being Haunted by a Reverent Destiny
1.I have climbed all the mountains in the world. I have climbed the tallest trees to their apical leaves. I have cruised the endless waters to the points where the earth kisses the sky, or back to my starting point in Lagos on the occasion when I kept westfor four hundred years for refusing to […]
On Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s The Naming
How can one become a worthy citizen of the world, a patriot of his country, and an active member of his community if he or she has no knowledge of his or her ancestry? This appears to be the implied question which Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s full-length poetry collection, The Naming (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) profoundly […]
The Shape of My Anxiety
O heavens, hear me now…Hear me on the edge of this wilderness, Ripping off my heart to you, calling out,A traveller at crossroads, in this thicket.Haven’t you heard me cry out to you?Haven’t you heard my voice of lament?Sometimes the day feels dry, Like rotten oranges decaying in my mouth.Sometimes the night comes too often,With […]
“Playing Bàtá in My Poetry”: A Conversation with Ifeoluwa Ayandele
Born in Tede, Nigeria, Ifeoluwa Ayandele is a poet with work in Callaloo, Poetry London, Magma, Michigan Quarterly Review, among other publications. Besides being shortlisted for the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize and the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, he has received the 2026 Pink Poetry Prize from Great […]
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 […]