The Girl Who Cried Poetry

Let’s talk about poetry.

Late 2020, after the careful passing of the quarantine, I discovered this love for poetry that made me look at life differently. We can all say the quarantine changed us one way or the other. For me, it was writing poems and reading them.

I didn’t want to go with the poems I read in my Literature textbook. They weren’t bad in any way, but I wanted to find poetry that I loved; poetry that spoke to me. I found the likes of Nikita Gill, Rupi Kaur, Erin Hanson, Atticus, R. H Sin and Alexandra Vasilliu. All wonderful poets with their own style of poetry that called out to me. That made me find the beauty in things where it appeared as if there was only darkness and ugliness.

Since then, I have only grown to appreciate poems in the way they call to me and enhance my feeling of spirituality and song, whether it is reading a poem or writing one.

I am sure you as a poet or a reader have found your own way of writing and appreciating poetry, both written and spoken word and for that, I appreciate you. You understand the way the world feels a bit lighter and magical with the rhythm and metaphor of words.

Today is World Poetry Day and it popped into my head that I should use the opportunity to celebrate wonderful poets and their poetry collections that I hold dearest to my heart.

Heaven Is A Metaphor by Samuel A. Adeyemi

About The Book
The Germain poet Rainer Maria Rilke comes to mind when you read Samuel A. Adeyemi, who is perennially in confrontation with the universe; in both poets’ work is the artist’s arrival of his antagonism towards the orthodoxy of everything. Rilke:

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me . . .

“God, forgive me,” is the recurring voice-in-the-wilderness floating on the poems in Adeyemi’s chapbook Heaven Is A Metaphor, as he fears himself, like a prodigal, leaving his Father, “reminiscing the days/ the Psalms comforted me—He set my feet/ upon a rock.”

In this poetry collection, Samuel explores themes of mental health and religious apathy in a way the reader is compelled to feel the emotion (s) he transmits in his poems.

I can’t talk about poetry without mentioning this poetry collection, because in a way, it changed the trajectory of my life and the way I view poetry. Samuel’s poems teach you to sit down with a poem and not just read it, but taste it and feel the way it washes over you. The imagery is profound and the language ,flowery but powerful. This is by far my favorite poetry collection and if you’ve read it, you’ll understand too. Here, let me quote two or three verses.

That words are incapable of healing means language forsakes. Show me who the poem has healed. I will carry my first love there and lay her at the feet of the verse.

Babel

One way to survive suffering is to compete:a preacher compares my suffering to aboy’s more severe / & the hunger I carry suddenly becomes half full. I call this amiracle of the rhetoric, the illusion of privilege to say I am only a wound in comparison to a corpse. How you invalidate my misery,until I crawl up the peak of peculiar pain.

To The Clergy

He’s so good. It was once my dream to marry him, you know. No, don’t look at me like that.

His other works are Anxiety and Things That Shatter and his newest, Rose Ash.

For The Love of Country and Memory by Michael Imossan

About The Book
This book is an immortalisation of memory; a finger pressed against times forehead as a way of saying that history is only a memory that has grown older.

For The Love of Country and Memory is a poetry collection that manages to steal my breath and hold me in an emotional chokehold and make me feel a pain amd agony which is common for Nigerians. It runs through times in the past and the poems? They are fucking amazing. Michael Imossan writes so well in a way that manages to make you cry and appreciate it at the same time. You know a good poem if it gives you PTSD. If I’m ever inspired, I would absolutely love to give an analysis.

My muse whispers to me: let us create this poem in our own image and then, the poems become broken.

Foreword

here, a man only knows disappointment if he sees the green in a promise and calls it tomorrow.

What I have learnt under the tutelage of my country

forgetting can be healing when remembrance begin to taste like knifecuts. (lord, bless me with the gift of amnesia)

How I explain natural and unnatural occurrences to my little brother;

See, if you’re not reading this after I’ve finally shared it after gatekeeping for months, you are not doing me, but you are doing yourself.

If My Body Could Speak by Blythe Baird

About The Book
Blythe Baird’s If My Body Could Speak is a celebration of girlhood and all of its struggles and triumphs.
In poems that dig deep into sexuality, acceptance of the body, survival of trauma, and learning to love yourself in spite of everything telling you not to, Baird’s voice is a rich addition to her generation. Searing, soaring, and heartbreaking, If My Body Could Speak balances the softness of femininity with the sharpness that girls are forced to become.
Includes poems such as “Girl Code 101”, “When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny”, and “Pocket-Sized Feminism” that have been watched by millions online.

I remember watching the spoken word performance of When The Fat Girl Gets Skinny by her majesty herself, Blythe Baird, and I felt literal chills. This poetry collection encompasses themes of sexuality, trauma, feminism, sexual assault, mental illness that make her poems so relatable and honest to God, not relatable in a way that feels like a meme, but the way that strikes you in your chest and makes you feel heard and seen.

Give me a God I can relate to. Commandments from a voice both soft and powerful. Give me one accomplishment of Mary’s that did not involve her vagina.

We are the daughters of men who warned us about the news and the missing girls on the milk carton and the sharp edge of the world. They begged us to be careful.To be safe. Then told our brothers to go out and play.

Pocket-sized Feminism

Gospels of Depression by Pamilerin Jacob

About The Book
Gospels of Depression is a thirty-page poetry chapbook, written by Pamilerin Jacob and published by the Poets in Nigeria Initiative. Pamilerin Jacob is an award-winning poet whose writings have been published in many international magazines. He is interested in the advocacy of the struggles of the mentally ill in the society.

The chapbook features seventeen poems most of which contain allusions to Biblical verses and passages. In the chapbook, Pamilerin creatively discusses suicide and the sufferings and stigma of mentally ill individuals.

Pamilerin Jacob is another poet whose poems have a distinct style and his way of weaving words so beautiful that you want to spend time uncovering its meanings and secrets. I relate personally with the poems because they’re mostly about mental illness and man, it’s so lovely. I most love the allusion to the bible. It’s brilliant!

There are more coffin makers than psychiatrists and they wonder why we ‘choose’ funerals.

Sorrowful Misery 03: Crowned with Tons (of Meds)

I suck darkness from the night sky  with a syringe, & inject the wound    spreading across my chest, my spirit  pulsating at the frequency of an owl’s cry.

Self Portrait as an Eternal Wound

Questions for Ada by Ijeoma Umebinyuo

About The Book
The artistry of QUESTIONS FOR ADA defies words, embodying the pain, the passion, and the power of love rising from the depths of our souls.  Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s poetry is a flower that will blossom in the spirit of every reader as she shares her heart with raw candor.  From lyrical lushness to smoky sensuality to raw truths, this tome of transforming verse is the book every woman wants to write but can’t until the broken mirrors of their lives have healed.  In this gifted author’s own words—“I am too full of life to be half-loved.”  A bold celebration of womanhood.

Questions for Ada is a poetry collection running across themes of feminism and self love. In the spirit of Women’s History Month, I recommend this book to every woman. This is the kind of book you sit down with your inner child near you. It’s so freaking good and uplifting.

“forcing manhood on boys with skin still made of silk and mother’s love is cruel.

In the beginning, there were women.

Stay away from men who peel the skin of other women, forcing you to wear them

Nah, scratch that. Everyone should not just read, but inhale, study and let the poems in this poetry collection breathe into you.

---

If you’re a poet or love to read poetry, then these books are a perfect read for you. Sit down one evening, pick them up in the coolness of the environment around you and experience them. Yes, because poetry is not just a thing to be read, but experienced.

In the spirit of World Poetry Day and utter shamelessness, if you ever want to read what I write, I have a small blog on medium where I share creative pieces and I have a couple of poems on there. Do check it out.

Happy World Poetry Day to the poets before us, to the poets now, to the poets who haven’t yet published a chapbook, to the poets who struggle to write, to the poets still trying to find their voice, to the poets who don’t believe in themselves, to the readers of poetry who manage to find poetry everywhere. Let the words of your dearest poems carry you on this day.