As I scroll through this brilliantly penned work, I find myself drawn to too many things at once. I am, at almost the same time, humbled by the sheer talent and penmanship of the poet whose gift of precision are evidenced in poem after poem. In one piece, a body is found twisted, in another, a body becomes water in the hands of a lover, in yet another, a girl, 30, is wanted for the murder of her lover while he was sleeping. Poetry is blended into shards of prose so effortlessly and with great skill and precision that we marvel at such creativity.
The body, for this poet, is a place of memory and love and displacement. The poems here are short but volatile, highly flammable, highly concentrated. They rise like carbon smoke and remain in the air for a long time after they’re read. For instance, in ‘The First Time I Saw a Gun’ the poet recalls:
‘The first time I used a gun, I was mad:
It was my father’s time, for my mother’s sake. They laid him out next to her.
I laid me out in the sun.’
The poems in this collection are scathing, are scalding, are terrifying. Astonishingly Dark. Bloody, yet inviting and spectacular. The women in this collection are fighters. They know what is at stake and are dying to talk about it. Each man holds his lips tight for fear that the pain would burst all over his face and stain the sheets with memories. There are lovers too, with fists opening into flowers. There are guns and there are bodies. This collection is sublime and poems therein excel in their brevity, lyricism and in the poems’ portrayal of the joyful, the dark, the triumphant and the poignant. I’m quite sure that there still are more and more things yet to come from this hugely phenomenal poet.
– Chisom Okafor
Focused on the themes of love and human relationships, the poet shows ways through which the material relationship has become highly commoditized. The centre of his poems inspires a cultural affirmation, a sense of politics, and memories; he was able to appeal to a broad spectrum of people. Love, which is often revered and overhyped, was redefined and this was to show us it’s subject-object relational chain. He succinctly captured this in many realities and significance.
– Francis Annagu
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