One Day I Will Dare To Raise My Middle Finger

This slim volume of thirty-three poems, which was longlisted for the Nigeria NLNG Prize for Literature in 2017, is bound thematically by the three-ply cord of death, gloom and positive self-deception. Peering through the anguished eyes of the persona in the poems, the reader finds a world smeared with melancholy. And since such reality can be daunting, a reasonable diversion is to set up an alternative reality, even one that is unrealistically optimistic. The first poem paints a very grim picture of the state of humans. Trapped in the vicious cycle ‘of birth and/ of chaos and/ of death’, the persona longs for a future in which death’s bluff will be called, vowing that: … one day I’ll dare—yes, I’ll dare, one day to raise my middle finger at the stork and the reaper! (‘Pieces of me in every crib and in every coffin’, p 11).