Sponsored by African Poetry Book Fund and edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set Series is an annual publishing project that has been championing the works of a new generation of African poets since its inception in 2014. Alumni of the series include Warsan Shire, ‘Gbenga Adeoba, Leila Chatti, Hiwot Adilow, Romeo Oriogun, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, D. M. Aderibigbe, Safia Elhillo, Inua Ellams, and Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau, among other luminaries. These three collections under review are parts of the ten chapbooks included in the 2025 edition of the series titled KUMI. Alongside Yaanom, In These Bones, I Am Shifting; and Voyaging are chapbooks by Nurain Ọládèjì, Qhali, Connor Coggill, Feranmi Ariyo, Dare Tunmise, and Adams Adeosun. The tenth chapbook collects the summary introductions that come with each chapbook.
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“And in the bluest vein of that night, / I was carrying these poems through a sunset, / to show them what the end of the world looks like.” So goes the end of “Yaanom,” the eponymous poem that opens Sarpong Osei Asamoah’s debut chapbook. Finely exaggerated and perhaps even demanded by the aims of Asamoah for his subjects of colonial legacy, historical reckoning, ancestral connection, and spiritual inheritance, the poem registers a tone, serious and somber, that takes necessity as the motivation for his poetic expression.
The motivation springs from necessity but is firmly rooted in history: Asamoah is concerned with Africa’s colonial history, and Ghana’s, specifically focusing on the transatlantic slave trade. In the last lines of “Dzin,” Asamoah expresses brilliantly how Christian Europe tailored its Christian teachings to suit their imperialist aspirations, and how proudly and unfeelingly so:
In the Jesus name,
the first British slave ship to arrive in Africa was JESUS of Lübeck,
chartered by Queen Elizabeth I to slavers in 1562;
they came—literally—in the name of Jesus!
If the mission of the poet is to enrich the literary history in which he works, as the critic Clive James once stated, then Asamoah enriches his African literary tradition by talking about age-old issues from a newer perspective and with plainer, bolder diction than such predecessors as Kofi Awoonor and Gabriel Okara, who approached the same with diplomatic criticism rather than direct condemnation. Africans take religion seriously because it is something to take seriously. However, the seriousness often tends to overlook the sort of atrocities that have been committed in its name.
In Yaanom, Asamoah brings that reality back by grounding such abstract concepts as religious colonization, historical erasure, colonial violence leading to cultural disruption, and the African diaspora’s disconnection from its heritage in specific historical events, figures, and places. There are notable mentions of the Elmina Castle and its bloody testimonies during the Atlantic Slave Trade in “At Elmina Castle I Bled” and “All the Saints of Elmina Castle Are Wet.” “Yaanom” means ancestor and so Yaa Asantewa, the exiled Queen Mother of Ejisu of the Ashanti Empire, in her turn, becomes for Asamoah an impeccable figure of female resistance against colonial power, her hair transformed into the weapon for that resistance, while being mythologically reframed in the weighty historical image of Eve, the challenge proper to established order:
In Seychelles,
Eve caresses Nana Yaa Asantewaa’s hair, turns it into a gun,
and unbraids it in the mouths of Brits.
In “Requiem,” Asamoah also traces a specific journey with a touch of irony bearing grim undertones:
I follow the red convoy in the Asofa sun.
Oh my tiny missionary massacre.
Pilgrim through Asofa, by way of Ghana, through Detroit, through Jacksonville, to dust,
like a bullet
sent from a voice in a bird flame’s head.
The irony in describing enslaved Africans as “Pilgrim” is devastatingly grim because it subverts the American mythology of pilgrims seeking freedom. Unlike the European pilgrims celebrated in American history, these African “pilgrims” were forcibly displaced, their journey marked not by choice but by violence. The progression from Asofa (symbolizing their African home) through the transit points of displacement to “dust” traces nothing but a journey of erasure. Most cutting is how Asamoah compares this path to a bullet’s trajectory, implying these people were weaponized by colonial powers, “sent from a voice in a bird flame’s head,” perhaps an oddly constructed metaphor invoking both the Holy Spirit (traditionally depicted as a dove) and the fiery rhetoric of Christian missionaries who justified enslavement. This way, Asamoah turns religious imagery into an indictment: he reveals how completely colonial Christianity inverted its own proclaimed values, making “pilgrims” of those they violently uprooted and destroyed.
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In Claudia Owusu’s debut chapbook In these Bones, I Am Shifting, the tension between her dual identity as Ghanaian-American is instantly manifest. In “Folktales,” a poem equally about her heritage and struggle with loneliness in a new land, the poet contends with the consequence of displacement and cultural dislocation: “Whether I like it or not, there is a rift on my tongue the size of a knife cut. / And every language I speak is born broken and jagged around the edges.” The “rift,” both cultural and linguistic, is a consequence of migration. Meanwhile, in “The Night I Leave Dansoman, Last Stop,” Owusu confronts the painful, often terrifying reality of rejection from her homeland as she laments through a haunting repetition of “Oh dear”:
the country I want does
not want me back. Oh dear,
I am blood running cold at the last pulsating vein.
I am garbage. I molder. Oh dear.
Oh dear, all the hanging stars could never redress
all this buried sorrow, all this quiet anger.
What does it mean to belong to multiple places? is the central question that the poet spends considerable parts of the collection exploring in the hope of finding a satisfying answer. However, in this particular case of being stuck between two complexities with their differing demands, no answer seems to be the right one and so Owusu moves across the circumference, celebrating her feminine lineage, community, body, girlhood, as well as her coming of age between those two places and cultures. Therefore, in such poems as “In My Mother’s Kitchen” and “Sister Efe,” about how women in her community provide for her anchoring points of identity, Owusu celebrates her feminine lineage by dismissing the male presence which is predominant in her both Ghanaian and American cultures:
And this isn’t a story
about how men love or
who they leave,
but one about women, what they borrow,
a man, a dress, a tank top, a car,
a faint memory of dancing bodies, and what they survive.
What love must have felt like in the dense midnight air,
the coo of a song fading and the echo of women singing along.
Amid the tension between her dual identity, Owusu’s recollections in “Girlhood: Mmaabaaberem” coupled with her incantatory language and repetition (“See, see, see”) creates a ritualistic quality that renders the aforementioned tension and complexity drab while locating the ultimate joy in the free and innocent playfulness of childhood: “See, see, see, all that we touch when we stretch our hands, / our fingers locked together when we spin in the circle. / Here, our bodies are more than shifting shadows.”
Furthermore, in her attempt to attain self-acceptance despite the rift experienced and the broken language spoken, Owusu presents the physical body in “Someday I will love Claudia Nana Yaa Akyaa Owusu” as a complex landscape where cultural identity takes a material form. Cataloguing specific physical attributes, Owusu enunciates those features as though they are symbols of her whole identity: “her bed of unruly hair, the mole under her eyes, / and the folds of her arms hinting, hug me / or caress me.”
The tension between her Ghanaian heritage and contemporary American culture at the beginning of the collection is here squashed in acknowledging all dimensions of her identity by including her full name, Claudia Nana Yaa Akyaa Owusu, in the title of the poem quoted above. Finally, when she writes, “Hallelujah! Claudia is a gift. Hallelujah! Claudia was put here to live. / Hallelujah! Claudia is a song. Hallelujah! Claudia will not stop singing,” she is claiming her right to exist fully in both cultural contexts. In the end, what this loud celebration of her complete, named self represents is integration rather than division.
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In literature, style is the breathing force of the imagination. So, in Voyaging, Nome Emeka Patrick’s long, sweeping, exhaustive lines are the breathing force of his concern with grief and its various transmutations. Throughout the collection, Patrick expresses both personal and collective grief, investigating how it transforms and is transformed. Both forms of grief overwhelm the poet and, in turn, the collection. However, Patrick’s description or depiction of this painful abstraction has a clear, if notional, threshold: it is hardly something to be escaped but at least something to journey through. This notion of grief as part and parcel of reality and living is treated in the poem that closes out the chapbook (“The Body Walks Through Grief Toward God”):
O, what is grief if not the mortician
that travels through the body?
Sometimes, I am a dent closer to happiness,
a wolf licking the moon off the dark.
Truly I say unto you,
life whets everything,
but why are our bones this responsive to loss?
Meanwhile, grief is not the only thing centering the collection: God is present throughout the book thirty times over. Patrick’s relationship with God, being grief-ridden, is both questioning and reverent, obviously complicated. Written in couplets with his signature extensive lines and after the somber 19th century Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, “In the Front Pew of an Opera II” is a sweeping testimony to that spiritual complicatedness which includes the speaker of the poem coming to terms with his existential desire—the desire to live long in love—as well as “doubt” as a necessary step towards his spiritual sublimation while the questioning continues with the same verve as his desire to live:
Even though the sky falls by layers. Even though the child
loses its way searching for the prints of God in the wild. I do not
want to leave this place. Not yet. Not with all the good souls.
The lips that have memorized mine, the strangers who have offered me
water in the dreams where I travel thirsty. The world is beautiful.
There are no two ways about it. The streams running to meet
their one true source, their babbles. O, the world, the world wants me
to love it. Despite its terrors, despite my errors. Lord, whose debt am I?
At the end of the poem, he acknowledges the ownership of his adventurous yet impermanent life to be God’s: “Once again, I know I am God’s debt.” Meanwhile, Patrick frequently returns to the body as a site of suffering—which in life is essentially part of living as the title of one poem, written in Nigerian Pidgin, implies: “[Is Not like Anybody Likes Grief, but Na Wetin Go Surely Come]”—and transcendence, which is a consequence of looking frankly inward towards spirituality. In both “Aquagenic Pruritus” and “Un/still Life with a Flower & Nothingness,” the speaker’s physical experience becomes the pathway to understanding his self and existence. The ending of the latter poem reads:
As I walk, my feet, against the floor that isn’t a floor but
a carpet of nothingness, ask, What sense do all these make? What?
I want to feel whole, so I pluck out my other arm. Listen, this is
the mystery. Inside the dream, any God would think me a flower.
In Voyaging, there is more than enough to say about Patrick’s complex exploration of grief, spirituality, and the body. However, despite the world being a place of suffering, he arrives at another place which is of concession, recognizing the inherent beauty of the world that spurs the poet to constantly, even vehemently, beseech God for a rather long journey through this complicated life.
