DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiquing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics.
The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two published collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and the volume includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley's introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of physical and spiritual mobility, diaspora, and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an interview of the poet by Chris Dunton that touches on the nature of poetry, language loss, and diasporic identities.
Nduka Otiono is an Associate Professor of African Studies and English at Carleton University in Ottawa. Formerly a journalist and General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors, his publications include two poetry books and a collection of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife, winner of the ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction.
JALA is the flagship journal of the African Literature Association (ALA), current Editor in Chief is Moradewun Adejunmobi. Image = Iya ni Wura, by Diana Mafe.
Book of the Year Award - Creative Writing: Nduka Otiono for DisPlace (Wilfred Laurier University Press) Honorable mention to James Yeku for Where the Baedeker Leads (Mawenzi House Publishers)
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Congratulations to @NdukaOtiono winner of Book of the Year Award – Creative Writing from the African Literature Association, for DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono (Peter Midgley, ed.) #LaurierPoetry #ReadUP https://t.co/7OSdUXFEIX https://t.co/ZJKtS6V3ax
Canada's Poetry Magazine, in publication for over 40 years. Arc 101 is available now! Tweets by Chris.
DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono is a collection of new poems and selected works, which Jay Miller has reviewed for the Arc website. Check out this discussion of the territory and topology of Nduka Otiono's poetry at https://t.co/IxHBQmeNZ4!
DisPlace is the contradictory being of Nduka Otiono: He's "here" in Canada, but he's also a dissident resident of Nigeria. He exists in the self-appointed Shangri-La that is the once-boastfully slaveholding Americas; but he insists on remaining the anointed exorcist of an Africa still decadent with bullets, with "militicians," who play baboons rather than messiahs.