It is a good year for Nigerian poetry, with debut collections by Adedayo Agarau and Gbenga Adesina just released, and one by Kanyin Olorunnisola forthcoming. Joining them is Brunel Prize winner Othuke Umukoro, whose beautifully titled Fenestration won the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize — selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss. The book is out on October 31, from Texas Review Press: The University Press of SHSU.
Here’s a description:
Othuke Umukoro’s Fenestration excavates public and private history. The poems here bristle with striking clarity and immediacy while compellingly confronting subjects such as the transatlantic slave trade, familial memory, HIV, environmental perils, and more. What happened inside those slave forts in Ghana, Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Africans were immured for weeks, sometimes months, before facing the horror of the Middle Passage? How does one carry the memory of his dead father? Fenestration, among other things, throbbing with an unflinching consciousness that splices history and memory, unfolds powerfully.
His professors at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Mark Levine and Tracie Morris, have praised the book.
Levine described it as one that “carefully builds, arranges and peers through an array of portals,” including “childhood memory of abundance and loss, collective memory of suffering and resilience, the dailiness of social life as a diasporic writer wrestling with poetic inheritance and possibility.”
The book, Morris wrote in her blurb, is “heart-centric, filled with tender poems of discovery.” The poems’s strength is in “the refined delicacy of understanding, through dilated pupils, the bayonets’ knife’s edge”:
Both through the intimacy of complex love between father and son, and the sweeping and intimate pain of those Africans whose involuntarily journeys created the African diaspora we know today, we comprehend what it means to perceive the world through haunted, multi-century somatic knowing.
Othuke Umukoro, also a playwright, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he won the Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. Since winning the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2021 (now the Evaristo Prize), he has taught at the University of Iowa and was the inaugural X.J. Kennedy Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and The Hudson Review.
Preorder Othuke Umukoro’s Fenestration via our affiliate link on Amazon or, for more options, his website.
