Overview

The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to ancestry. The poems in this collection examine the various ways one remains tied to their ancestors by reimagining memories, history, homesteads, migration, and the intersections of the past, present, and possible futures. Through this exploration, the collection seeks to rebuild a world that doesn’t merely replicate realities but reinvents, enshrines, and restories them. Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s poems offer a vital contribution to African cultural studies through their focus on Igbo heritage and ancestry.

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9781496244703

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Reviews

“The Naming is the story of surrender, how the child surrenders to the parent, and the adult to the infant. Thus, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto creates themselves, a poet, a multiplicity of voices, in language that is familiar but entirely new. Beginning with incantations, the collection seems to collect from antiquity and carry the reader on a current of sound through actual historical moments, reverie, confession, and fantasy. The poems recraft the traditional dialogue between life and magic, to the disturbances of the present, in a language that is vivid and resonant. These poems deliver us to the knowledge of what it means to be human, and African, in humor and reverence and wonder.”—Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, author of The Everyday Wife and ice cream headache in my bone “Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s The Naming engraves in language lineages that whisper through his fingers. And thus, he never separates himself from the grounding of his spiritual force fields. These poems, of such interior strength and wonder, intone wisdoms only found on the outskirts of our parochial facades. The result? The Naming makes peace with historical wounds and spurs us to live in complete astonishment.”—Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022 and The Absurd Man

Author Information

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is from Ishiowerre, Owerri-Nkworji, in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of the chapbook The Teenager Who Became My Mother. His work has won multiple awards and has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Malahat Review, Lolwe, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, LitMag, Colorado Review, Salamander, Oxford Poetry, and the Republic.  

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