"Contraband Bodies is a personal record of migratory travails and a country lost to precarious politics. It is a conscious elegy of displacement and home regained through the tribute of roads, evoking diasporic conditions in a new way by highlighting through pixelated imagery, syncopated language, and lapidary details the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa, Europe, and America."
"For more than two decades, poetry anthologies in African literature have navigated the shared world of African identity or living in the continent of Africa without capturing comprehensively the lifeworld of African cities. African Urban Echoes is a gathering of poets, including notable Canadian poets such as Jumoke Verissimo, Uchechukwu Umezurike, James Yeku and the Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Tolu Oloruntoba, that seek to contribute to the echoes of resistance, hope, and anxieties all produced simultaneously by African urban centers in their polyvalences and unique characters. Poets from different African countries evoke detailed portraits of lives as cities and cities as lives. They compel us to see both the defined and undefined beauties of African cities through sublime experiences captured in disparate forms and network of images in this anthology. They immerse their readers in marginal realities of urban citizenship and turn them to witnesses of both familiar and unfamiliar landscapes from Lagos, Lome, Johannesburg to Tunis, and of places that are inevitably part of their stories as pilgrims, as travelers settling and leaving."
"By bringing the consciousness of migrants into focus, in language that is both distilled and incantatory, Olajide’s poems do not allow us to move past the visceral experiences of others so easily."
I spent part of my spring last year in Manchester in the quiet neighborhood of Burdith Avenue, an extension of Fallowfield, where my partner and I shared a small studio…
October 21, 2024 4:00 pm
Selected by editor Bardia Sinaee, the 2024 edition of Best Canadian Poetry showcases the best Canadian poetry writing published in 2022. Featuring: Olajide Salawu • Nina Berkhout • Nicholas Bradley • Alison Braid • Louise Carson • Hilary Clark • Erin Conway-Smith • Nancy Jo Cullen • Kayla Czaga • Rocco de Giacomo • Jean Eng...
January 29, 2024 12:00 am
Nigerian poet Salawu Ọlájídé joins host Ingrid Rose to discuss his chapbook, Preface for Leaving Homeland. Ọlájídé is a Ph.D candidate at University of Alberta with a passionate interest in de-colonization. "Goodbye is a migrant word", Ọlájídé says of the title of his poem, Goodbye to Lampedusa...
June 18, 2022 4:00 pm
VMI Celebration Reading JUN 4, 2022 | BY ELEE KRALJII GARDINER We welcome you to the year-end celebration reading of the 2022 cohort including our two VMI Fellows and VMI Pro author! Join us for a Zoom event on Sat June 18, 4pm PST-5:15pm PST by RSVPing for a link to info AT vancouvermanuscriptintensive.com
July 29, 2015 12:00 am
The winner of the Babishai Poetry Award 2015 will be announced during the Babishai Poetry Festival scheduled for 26 to 28 August in Kampala at The Uganda Museum. The poems and those in the running for poetry glory are..