Jazz Negotiations

“Echezonachukwu Nduka’s Jazz Negotiations draws you in like a musical string, the cord upon which a note hangs. Every poem stays with you, line after line, surprisingly overtaking your senses like your favorite song. Page after page, the poems travel through musical notes, the keys of pianos, symphonies, even church music and dirges render themselves to poetic notes, and linger like a song deep inside the reader. I have always believed that poetry is the mother of music, the beginning of all things musical, and now, in this beautiful collection, I find myself drawn by Nduka’s powerful exploration of the delicate relationship between the two. In a book that negotiates the Africa of Nduka’s birth and his new world of America, Echezonachukwu Nduka’s Jazz Negotiations takes us on a journey across many landscapes as we examine every aspect of the life we thought we knew against the life we wish we knew. Here is an urgently necessary book, a must read. This book is for music and poetry lovers, everyone.”

—Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, author of Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems

“A jazzman’s hymn to sound and self, Nduka’s Jazz Negotiations is a score for survival and tenderness, written with the precision of a tuning fork and the sweep of a symphony. Moving between cities, histories, hauntings, and silences, these poems return us to the body’s own rhythm, to the ruptures and reconciliations of living, reminding us that to endure is also to create beauty.”

—Efe Paul-Azino, author of For Broken Men Who Cross Often

“This is a collection of lovely poems. Each poem is a voice that becomes multiple voices, a soul that becomes multitude through its semantics of light or darkness. Beauty, even where it is shaped out of personal or collective angst, preserves its mode as art.”

—Obari Gomba, author of The Lilt of The Rebel