All that Refuses to Die: African Poetry Book
Autor Michael Imossanen Limba Engleză Paperback – mar 2026
All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean.
All that Refuses to Die is a collection that brims with stories and memories that evoke as well as provoke. As he moves through historical places, the poet compares the past with the present and finds that nothing has really changed.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496246097
ISBN-10: 1496246098
Pagini: 120
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 7 mm
Greutate: 0.17 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria African Poetry Book
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496246098
Pagini: 120
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 7 mm
Greutate: 0.17 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria African Poetry Book
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet of Ibibio origin. He is curator of the poetry column for Nigerian NewsDirect, poetry editor for the Chestnut Review, and the author of the award-winning chapbook For the Love of Country and Memory. Imossan’s second chapbook, The Smell of Absence, was selected for inclusion in Kumi Na Moja: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set. He is a recipient of a PEN International writers’ grant. Kwame Dawes is a professor of literary arts at Brown University and the director and series editor of the African Poetry Book Fund.
Extras
Stories that I Must Open
Fatima, I see how you touch
the night as though it has stolen something
from you. I have been there once, felt it pull
something from the crevices of my joints
when, at the checkpoint, the police officer kept
searching my pocket as if I hid a country in it,
an AK-47 over his shoulder, swinging back and forth.
At the airport, the immigration
officer waltzed inside my kaftan to see if
somehow there was 9/11 embroidered on it.
Happiness is a door that opens into sorrow.
Even the smile that tiptoed the edge of my lips
was a man stranded at the border of a strange town.
I called the stars a map, a road
and the sky was set on fire.
Whatever joy morning promised is a poem left unfinished;
the sun beaming on a small village in Plateau where the
charred bones of burnt girls becoming one with the sand
have also become stories that I must open.
True Story
Even though we had left early,
something still followed us; the trail
of blood from last night’s attack,
smoke slicing through dawn’s waking eyes,
houses razed down, yellow futures smothered
into char—their
eyes once shimmering with color
now full of surrender. We ran into the unfurling dawn.
Dew drops perched on our clothes like resting
birds and soaked into our skin until we
were heavy with sky water. Everything pointed
back to our burnt home; the feel of wet air crawling inside us.
The moon curved above our heads like a capsized
boat. Cocks crowed the unfolding of chaos.
What we lost cannot be named. What survived that night
only survived broken.
We did not want to look back. We did not want
to remember that which begged to be forgotten.
Memory sat caged inside our bones.
We wore our sorrows like funeral clothes, trudging
through steep paths, hiding from the main road
where a blockade had been made, where men
who knew little about God searched through cars
for unbelievers. We lifted our lanterns and the road
to the next village brightened in front of us.
We hoped there was safety waiting for us there.
I wish I could tell you we had escaped, but that we are alive
means we will always light candles for those who became wind,
means we will always carry in our eyes the remains of those who
got held back by night. Of what use is such escape?
I never thought I’d be back here.
The night air is still the same, the smell of tsire twirls inside it.
Not too far from me, men spray mats under a tree, resting,
and whispering stories into the soft covers of darkness.
Alhamdulillah, there’s calmness in the city’s vein yet something
is telling me to run, something is telling me to force open dawn’s
mouth and hide.
Fatima, I see how you touch
the night as though it has stolen something
from you. I have been there once, felt it pull
something from the crevices of my joints
when, at the checkpoint, the police officer kept
searching my pocket as if I hid a country in it,
an AK-47 over his shoulder, swinging back and forth.
At the airport, the immigration
officer waltzed inside my kaftan to see if
somehow there was 9/11 embroidered on it.
Happiness is a door that opens into sorrow.
Even the smile that tiptoed the edge of my lips
was a man stranded at the border of a strange town.
I called the stars a map, a road
and the sky was set on fire.
Whatever joy morning promised is a poem left unfinished;
the sun beaming on a small village in Plateau where the
charred bones of burnt girls becoming one with the sand
have also become stories that I must open.
True Story
Even though we had left early,
something still followed us; the trail
of blood from last night’s attack,
smoke slicing through dawn’s waking eyes,
houses razed down, yellow futures smothered
into char—their
eyes once shimmering with color
now full of surrender. We ran into the unfurling dawn.
Dew drops perched on our clothes like resting
birds and soaked into our skin until we
were heavy with sky water. Everything pointed
back to our burnt home; the feel of wet air crawling inside us.
The moon curved above our heads like a capsized
boat. Cocks crowed the unfolding of chaos.
What we lost cannot be named. What survived that night
only survived broken.
We did not want to look back. We did not want
to remember that which begged to be forgotten.
Memory sat caged inside our bones.
We wore our sorrows like funeral clothes, trudging
through steep paths, hiding from the main road
where a blockade had been made, where men
who knew little about God searched through cars
for unbelievers. We lifted our lanterns and the road
to the next village brightened in front of us.
We hoped there was safety waiting for us there.
I wish I could tell you we had escaped, but that we are alive
means we will always light candles for those who became wind,
means we will always carry in our eyes the remains of those who
got held back by night. Of what use is such escape?
I never thought I’d be back here.
The night air is still the same, the smell of tsire twirls inside it.
Not too far from me, men spray mats under a tree, resting,
and whispering stories into the soft covers of darkness.
Alhamdulillah, there’s calmness in the city’s vein yet something
is telling me to run, something is telling me to force open dawn’s
mouth and hide.
Cuprins
Foreword by Kwame Dawes
Acknowledgements
Stories that I Must Open
True Story
Collector of Hurt
Tiira
Arise News
What Death Can Be Offered All that Refuses to Die?
I Want to Lavender
With What Heart Will She Forgive?
Going Home to Mother
Run
The Philosophy of Escape
In the Centre of All that Refuses to Die
Please, Native Me
The Door of No Return
I. A Lineage of Water
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Naming
No Victor, No Vanquished
Breaking news
Deborah
Calling the Name of God in Vain
The Necromancy of Dead Protesters
Southern Kaduna
Herdsmen
The Nigerian Dream
Given Another Chance
One Day I Will Relive My Memories
Tell Me About Home
Softness Lives Here
Welcome to Cameroun
What do I Have?
Ocean
I Will Go Back Home
Sinking Song
Three Nigerias
Waiting for Tomorrow to Turn Green
There’s No Hell in Love, Only Heaven
The Complicity of Language/All That Refuses to Die
Kofar Na’Isa
Daughters of Me
Lexis and Suffering
Aiding and Abetting Joy
Shame
Suffocating songs
Sand Food
Because All Has Refused to Die
Because Nigerian Poets Shouldn’t Be Writing About Love and Ice-creams
Rose-Petal-Girl
NYSC
All That Refuses to Die is Dead
Notes and Source Acknowledgments
Acknowledgements
Stories that I Must Open
True Story
Collector of Hurt
Tiira
Arise News
What Death Can Be Offered All that Refuses to Die?
I Want to Lavender
With What Heart Will She Forgive?
Going Home to Mother
Run
The Philosophy of Escape
In the Centre of All that Refuses to Die
Please, Native Me
The Door of No Return
I. A Lineage of Water
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Naming
No Victor, No Vanquished
Breaking news
Deborah
Calling the Name of God in Vain
The Necromancy of Dead Protesters
Southern Kaduna
Herdsmen
The Nigerian Dream
Given Another Chance
One Day I Will Relive My Memories
Tell Me About Home
Softness Lives Here
Welcome to Cameroun
What do I Have?
Ocean
I Will Go Back Home
Sinking Song
Three Nigerias
Waiting for Tomorrow to Turn Green
There’s No Hell in Love, Only Heaven
The Complicity of Language/All That Refuses to Die
Kofar Na’Isa
Daughters of Me
Lexis and Suffering
Aiding and Abetting Joy
Shame
Suffocating songs
Sand Food
Because All Has Refused to Die
Because Nigerian Poets Shouldn’t Be Writing About Love and Ice-creams
Rose-Petal-Girl
NYSC
All That Refuses to Die is Dead
Notes and Source Acknowledgments
Recenzii
“Michael Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true.”—Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic and Tethered to Stars
“What is impressing me about Michael Imossan’s work is the manner in which he is negotiating multiple ‘influences’ and compulsions as a poet, for these manifest themselves in his lyricism and his engagement with a personal narrative of self and self-identity as well as his own wrestling with the influence of tradition. It is telling that were we to list the personages that appear in his epigraphs and, to some extent, in his allusions, we will understand Imossan to be fully ensconced in contemporary world literature. And yet we will also see the extent to which he has become immersed in the varied milieu of contemporary African poetry.”—Kwame Dawes, from the foreword
“What is impressing me about Michael Imossan’s work is the manner in which he is negotiating multiple ‘influences’ and compulsions as a poet, for these manifest themselves in his lyricism and his engagement with a personal narrative of self and self-identity as well as his own wrestling with the influence of tradition. It is telling that were we to list the personages that appear in his epigraphs and, to some extent, in his allusions, we will understand Imossan to be fully ensconced in contemporary world literature. And yet we will also see the extent to which he has become immersed in the varied milieu of contemporary African poetry.”—Kwame Dawes, from the foreword
Descriere
All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the conditions of Africans through a historical lens, comparing the past with the present and finding that nothing has really changed.