Book Review 2018-002
Acts of Crucifixion by Kechi Nomu
2018 by Akashic Books, 28 pages
(I received a review copy of the box set of chapbooks, New-Generation African Poems, this is a part of from the publisher).
There's a repetitive refrain in Nomu's poem "Postscript: Four Boys are Murdered One Morning in Aluu":
I am telling you there is a fierceness to these things:
A body letting itself be penetrated by all these forms of love at once.
that seems to hit on things seen throughout the sixteen poems in this chapbook. A body being penetrated, or if not penetrated, worked to some degree, appears throughout the collection:
The boy's body
bends
Your old bones are seeking
wooden crosses
a little of the love still burning,
a little of the places inside him where his bones have been bent,
broken.
once I saw a man like me take a knife to the center of his hands to crucify him-
self, to show us where, how he bleeds.
Nomu also provides that fierceness noted in that refrain in poems:
Inside you: beast trapped in car light at dusk,
giving birth to another beast.
Mouthful, how long does a person not breathe
before they stop altogether?
She dies carrying a bomb,
head severed from her body,
memories severed.
Without creating named characters, Kechi Nomu has put together a short collection of poems that almost moves along as a novel might. The opening poem, "Note to the Boy Kicking the Stone" ends:
Here, a story begins,
rises, falls,
and ends
in ghosts.
and the final poem, "Memory," ends:
Your memory,
jellyfish soft,
unguent hungry,
eats everything in plain sight
because the past wants to speak to you.
and in between are fathers and sons, generations of women, people who sin, bleed, searched for God, bombed for God, loved, and interacted not out of love, but to avoid loneliness. Her poems look at memory and how it's processed--how it affects one (often by having it oddly interact with the current, and maybe even the future, at times). Nomu's poems seem to lead into each other as one nudges the next forward from that initial story beginning to the sharing of memories at the end. It's a chapbook that makes me anticipate a full Kechi Nomu collection.
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