Smoking the Bible

Starred review from March 1, 2022
Abani's radiant seventh poetry collection emanates grit and beauty, while the senses are called to attention. Right from the start, ""Flay"" tells us that a "Migrant, / punished by spice and the scent of cooking," will be thankful for "the persistent aftertaste of a lost home." As a political refugee from Nigeria living in the U.S., Abani, a highly acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist, reflects on how displacement is always present as he fuses shadows of love and pain, loss and attempts at resurrection, and the lingering traumas of violence. In ""White Egret,"" Abani writes, "What you taste with abandon / even God cannot take from you." And in the sublime ""A Small Awe,"" "The world we carry inside follows us everywhere. / Our imagined home remains nostalgia." In ""Lineage,"" colonial brutality echoes through time as the poet attempts to break the cycle, "My body is the house of tomorrow. / My skin is prophecy." Abani writes of his brother's illness, the deaths of family members, seeking forgiveness, and the empty space that can only be filled by poetry and love. Abani's grace and fortitude are resonant. There is elegy here and mercy and faith: "Words sung right can save us."

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 18, 2022

Nigerian-born and now rooted in the Midwestern United States, award-winning poet/novelist Abani (Sanctificum) takes readers on a journey in his lyrically wrought and emotionally piercing new poetry collection. Two brothers part, one facing terminal illness, the other traveling abroad because it is too dangerous for him to stay at home. The pain of that separation is rendered in biblical terms, with imagery of fire and flight prevailing throughout; the flames here signify both destruction and renewal, while the man's flight is not just literal but metaphorical: "All my life, men with blackened insides/ have fought to keep/ the flutter of a white egret in my chest/ from bursting into flight, into glory." Many immigrant accounts focus on the shock of arrival, but while Abani captures that experience through powerful sensuous language ("Migrant, / ...you wake up on a cold day in another country/ and put faith in hot rice and braised goat, ...persistent aftertaste of a lost home"), he's especially good as conveying the journey itself ("Traveling as a way of emptying out all that cannot be emptied"). In the end, though home and past are irretrievable, he has memories (some painful), saying, "The red earth of my homeland is both wound and suture." VERDICT A masterly and distinctive study of the travails of leaving home; highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.