A MUSUEM OF UNFINISHED MEN

“As Kukogho often does, he arrives in A Museum of Unfinished Men, fully ready to excavate the perilous ground between boyhood and manhood, where fathers cast shadows long enough to strangle saplings, and sons must burn their way toward an afterlight. These poems are lightning-struck pines, piñatas beaten until they crack open, rivers clawing away from the lakes that would keep them still. Kukogho writes about masculinity as a museum of a curated chronicle of wounds passed down like heirlooms, of childhoods buried alive in the bodies of men who grew up too fast. With surgical precision and lethal tenderness, Samson maps the distance between the cone and its tree, the terror and the boy, the silences and violence. A Museum of Unfinished Men reckons, refuses, arrives, recedes, tenders, hardens, but most importantly, exposes a poet who wants to be deeply felt.”

—Adedayo Agarau, author of The Years of Blood

“The poet points an accusing finger even as he acknowledges the other fingers pointing at him. In this collection, Kukogho embarks on a brave and painful journey to strip toxic masculinity to its primal state. These poems rise from the impossible middle ground between elegies for a lost childhood, songs of regret, and songs of hope – they ache like failed explanations, like a litany of excuses. Yet, they proffer a much-needed redemption for posterity.”

—Iquo DianaAbasi, author of Coming Undone as Stitches Tighten & Symphony of Becoming

“A Museum of Unfinished Men is a gentle and courageous collection of lyrical poems that quietly speaks to difficult truths, moving through memory, and the tender spaces where boys become men, and all that lies between. These poems feel lived-in, honest, and intimate, the kind that linger in the mind and heart long after the book is closed.”

—S. Su’eddie Vershima Agema, multiple award-winning author of Memory and the Call of Waters

“When words wear the garb of conscious observations they transmute, they are no longer words, they become prophecy. These are the words of a prophet. Water them on your heart as talismans, as compasses pointing to the island of truth.”

—Umar Abubakar Sidi, author of The Poet of Dust and The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus