A coup d’état is supposed to be an illegal, violent ransacking and toppling of a noble government that has been legitimized through a popular ballot, whose usurping force equally ought to issue from an … Read the whole text
Forbidden any right to write or speak to countermand
Stubborn, deliberate curses—the catcalls and Calumny,
I recalled Benda; I thought of Céline (or Louis-Ferdinand
Destouches)—polemical, cynical, his bravura ellipses
Turning every passage … Read the whole text
(Scholar-Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with Helen Walsh, Novelist and Literary Activist)
Amatoritsero Ede: It is great to finally have this conversation with you. I would like to begin at … Read the whole text
Transportation’s tough,
if you want to be transported:
the blockbuster museum’s hush
is uniform, like sand.
Adjust the audio tour,
and behind the curtain
of information hiss
streams of static—
what’s art but marked
exits, the urge to … Read the whole text
Since his unexpected death on 7 August 2022, a lot has been written about Biyi Bandele’s life and work by colleagues, friends, family and fans. How he started his writing career as a precocious 14-year-old, by winning … Read the whole text
I am uncomfortable with the uncritical transposition of Western social taxonomies on African societies. I’ve never fully bought into the notion that Nigerian maleness can be accurately characterized with or contained in terms such as … Read the whole text
Teardrops on the Weser
by Amatoritsero Ede
Winnipeg, MN: Griots Lounge, 2021
64 pp. $20.99
With Teardrops on the Weser, Amatoritsero Ede guides his readers on a transformative journey across landscapes and memories bringing to the surface … Read the whole text
The Artist and the Assassin
by Mark Frutkin
Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2021
213 pp. $19.95
The Wordsmith and the Half-Fallen Angel
In The Artist and the Assassin, Mark Frutkin has penned a page turner of lyrical imagination … Read the whole text
J’Accuse . . . ! (Poem Versus Silence)
by George Elliott Clarke,
Exile Editions,
198 pages, $26.95
Some poetry whispers. Some poetry shouts. This collection of poetry shouts out loud, with great creative skill. And it shouts for … Read the whole text
Canticles II (MMXIX)
by George Elliott Clarke
Guernica Editions,
2019. 505 pp.
ISBN 978-1-77183-409-4
In a 2022 text, George Elliott Clarke calls his Canticles series “an expected six-volume epic…that begins with the survey of two … Read the whole text
