Fenestration

“Othuke Umukoro’s Fenestration is keenly aware of the violent implications of its title, but its sense of language and metaphor as repositories of historical complexity are broader than that. Fenestration carefully builds, arranges and peers through an array of portals: childhood memory of abundance and loss, collective memory of suffering and resilience, the dailiness of social life as a diasporic writer wrestling with poetic inheritance and possibility. Stitching his own transatlantic crossings—physical and psychic—through a harrowing imagination of the Middle Passage, Umukoro blends lush lyricism with observational directness, gazing with steady eyes at the world of fact and sensation and at the ‘coffined dark’ within. Umukoro’s is a bracing, painful and ultimately affirming vision: ‘Whichever way I look, I am what is bent.’”

—Mark Levine, author of Sound Fury

“Othuke’s heart-centric new work, Fenestration, is filled with tender poems of discovery. They stay with the reader long after the end of a page, and the book. The strength of these poems is in the refined delicacy of understanding, through dilated pupils, the bayonets’ knife’s edge. Both through the intimacy of complex love between father and son, and the sweeping and intimate pain of those Africans whose involuntarily journeys created the African diaspora we know today, we comprehend what it means to perceive the world through haunted, multi-century somatic knowing.”

—Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems

“Tracing roots, wounds, injustices, small gestures of kindness, aspirations, worthiness, and possibility . . . these poems reveal a profound sense of care, witness, and love.”

—Susan L. Leary