The Origin of Wounds

“Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Origin of Wounds is a haunting dirge for loss, where “natives weigh their dreams / on the scale of war.” Though rooted in Nigeria, the poems resonate globally, from the Middle East and South America to the United States and its mass shootings. Malik is a lucid truthsayer of our time, and his poems are prayers of remembrance, in which “the hand of history / still reaches from the dark room of forgetfulness.” Each line, each poem, stands witness, building a mourning procession that leads the reader toward praise—praise of “the ancestors for carrying us through / the storm of the world."

—Kaveh Bassiri, Judge for 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize

“Through a voice both elegiac and liturgical, the poems in Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s powerful debut, The Origin of Wounds transform burial into sacrament. And weaving a history of slavery, diaspora, impoverishment, and victimization, from the Middle Passage to the current tragic migrant flow through the Mediterranean, the drowned are not forgotten, but are elevated into subjects of sacred lament, their loss archived in “the diary of water.”

—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas, Winner of a MacArthur Fellowship

"A heartbreaking lyrical debut, The Origin of Wounds shows us how to look at the broken world without blinking, while urging us to praise it in its sorrow, as well as in “the fragile arms of hope.”

—Danusha Laméris, author of Blade by Blade, 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz Country, California

“Long practice has made Malik a master of the dirge as a genre. His delivery seems almost effortless but then we also know that there is really no such thing as effortlessness in any genre. Before we get halfway in the collection, we realise that we are watching and listening to a master at work.”

—Tade Ipadeola, author of The Sahara Testaments, Winner, 2013 NLNG Prize