DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono, published as part of Canada’s most prestigious poetry series, Laurier Poetry Series (LPS) of Wilfrid University Press has just come out fresh from the press, courtesy WluPress Canada.
Containing his new and selected poems, Professor Nduka Otiono stated “copies of the new book arrived at my Ottawa home two days ago,”
Stated the Assistant Professor and Graduate Program supervisor at the Institute of African studies at the Carleton University, Ottawa Canada: “The book is more beautiful than I had imagined – -what with the surprising bold green back cover that nicely contrasts with the black and white cover. The great cover art by celebrated Nigerian-American fine artist and my friend Victor Ekpuk, also turned out really nice.”
According to the publishers: “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two published collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and the volume includes previously unpublished new poems.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.”
Some eminent scholars and writers have also provide a clue to the content of the collection. Some of these are:
“The most personal of Otiono’s poems are mostly elegiac, with death pawing at the door, and the language swaying with a new, lithe spring to it and the strength one associates with fine, high-tensile wire. The poet’s imagistic reflections on life are at once sonorous, contemplative, bold, and defiant.” — Chris Dunton, Professor of Literature in English and former Dean of The Faculty of Humanities at The National University of Lesotho, Roma
“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.” — George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, 2016-17
The book is available on the publisher’s website, https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/D/DisPlace, as well as on Amazon and other major online book vendors and traditional bookstores across Canada and internationally.
Otiono continues, “now’ it’s time to move ahead with promotion/marketing… top on my agenda is getting a Nigerian edition of the book published, and organising a reading tour in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Asaba early next year.”
