poetry

The Nigeria Prize 2022: Garlands for New Blood

by

If it wasn’t obvious enough that the leading poetic voices on the continent now belong to a new generation of writers bred in the jungles of the internet and raised in the angst of 21st-century dilemmas and preoccupations, the new NLNG prize shortlist has made it clearer.

From Olongo Africa
On November 6, 2022
Categories

Saddiq Dzukogi’s Poetics of Grief

by

Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art describes language as “home of being.” He also describes poetry as a form with powers to disclose “being.”

From Olongo Africa
On October 7, 2022
Categories

TENDERNESS

by

Tenderness teaches us that if we consider softness with enough rigor, if we consider ourselves with enough softness, a wound is a portal, not an end.

From Tasteful Rude
On October 5, 2022
Categories

The Happiest People on Earth

by

I come from the country / Of the Happiest People on earth, / Where death sells at ten for one kobo / And the Living envy the peace

From Olongo Africa
On July 18, 2022
Categories

Mama Calls Me Tennis Ball Because I Always Bounce Back

by

I still remember my ball boy training you have to squat with your left leg simultaneously kneel with your right leg perpendicular to your left so even if you miss the catch the ball is halted by your legs at a 90-degree angle I often missed the catch even before my strokes

From Olongo Africa
On June 30, 2022
Categories

A Nigerian Poet’s Dangerous Amorous Episodes

by

In the traditions that established earlier voices in modern Africa poetry, sociopolitical maladies have remained an arch theme. In the words of Omafune Onoge, what rocks African poetry most is the crisis of consciousness.

From Olongo Africa
On May 24, 2022
Categories

a big faith in goodness and beauty and power of moral uprising

by

an email from a friend in Gdansk

From Popula
On April 12, 2022
Categories

Where Is Our Government?

by

“We have a lot of insecurity in Nigeria. By road we are not safe. By train we are not safe”. (From a survivor of the Abuja-Kaduna Train bomb; Mon., March 28, 2022)

From Olongo Africa
On April 11, 2022
Categories

Lonely Night the Poet Sells Himself as Lover to Dream

by

Ernest O. Ògunyemi is a staff writer at Open Country Mag. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Tinderbox, Sierra Nevada Review, Journal Nine, The Indianapolis Review, Down River Road, Capsule Stories, No Tokens, The West Review, The Dark Magazine, Mud Season Review, Agbowó, Isele, and in the anthology 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry III. He is the curator of The Fire That Is Dreamed of: The Young African Poets.

From Olongo Africa
On November 29, 2021
Categories

Preachy Internal Poll: What Is Poetry?

by

Disagree? Vote here.

From Preachy
On October 15, 2021
Categories

Some places become homes by habit

by

When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they were thought to be business records, but what if they were poems or psalms?

From Olongo Africa
On September 3, 2021
Categories

Language as Salvation

by

The language of the Qur’an is the language of poetry and so I found that meaning was the eye into translation and not the other way round. That’s when I began to take the exegeses and history classes more seriously. Without them, I found translation useless to my spirituality.

From Preachy
On June 28, 2021
Categories

[POETRY] Brocade

by

How often we find rest in the place for longing, fame in the space of hiding, the truth in the face of the neonates.

From Olongo Africa
On June 14, 2021
Categories