I have been a fan of the author for quite a long time and she continues to be an inspiration to me and many poets alike.
Reading this collection was a really interesting experience. Having listened to the author’s spoken word poetry and her album ‘Swim’ so many times, it was a shift from how I would usually enjoy her poetry but almost equally enjoyable. It was a quick read as I had expected because I found that it was important to take my time an savor each poem as I read along. Inspired by the abduction of the Chibok schools girls in Nigeria by the Boko Haram militants, ‘This is How We Disappear’ captures the different ways in which women have been set aside and the miraculous ways in which we have evolved from oppression and pain. Just as listening to her spoken word poetry always inspires me to write, reading these well crafted poems has driven me to take notes which will definitely and hopefully birth some heartwarming poems.
Titilope Sonuga is a poet I admire and will continue to her work closely. I highly recommend this collection.
Rating: 4 Stars
Published: April 19, 2019 by Write Bloody North
Pages:
Genre: Poetry
The Author:
Titilope Sonuga is an award-winning poet, writer and performer who calls both Edmonton, Canada and Lagos, Nigeria home. She is the first poet to appear at a Nigerian presidential inauguration, performing an inaugural poem, We Are Ready, at the May 2015 ceremony. She was the winner of the 2011 Canadian Authors’ Association Emerging Writer Award for her first self published collection of poems, Down To Earth. Her second collection Abscess was published in 2014 by Geko Publishing (South Africa).
Her work has appeared in Brittle Paper, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry, was translated into Italian for El-Ghibli Magazine, and into German for the Berlin International Poetry Festival. She read alongside Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bassey Ikpi and Chinua Achebe at the first poetry showcase of the Achebe Colloquium on Africa at Brown University.
She was shortlisted for the Africa Center Artist in Residency (AIR) program in 2015 and was an Open Society (OSIWA) Foundation Resident Poet on Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal in the same year. Her work was published in the OSIWA anthology, Soaring Africa, along with twenty select poets from across the African continent. She was a speaker at TedxEdmonton in 2014 and was the 2015 – 2016 ambassador for Intel Corporation’s She Will Connect Program in Nigeria. She played “Eki” in the NdaniTV hit television series Gidi Up, which airs across Africa. She is the recipient of the 2018 Edmonton Arts Council Large Project Grant to produce her spoken word album “Swim”.
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