Unbind Me Now

“The best poetry is not the kind that speaks only with elegance, nor that which speaks only with truth. Rather, it is the one that speaks a message of truth with an elegance accessible to the poet and the enthusiast alike. Eze’s Unbind Me Now achieves this with raw, fiery defiance.”

—Kukogho Samson, author of A Museum of Unfinished Men

“From the sacred flare of a burning bush, Unbind Me Now rises as poetry of urgent witness. James Ngwu Eze writes for a generation living with fracture, loosening a throat long clenched by fear and fatigue. These poems speak fire into injustice, cradle embers of private grief, and listen closely to a planet learning how to mourn.  Moving between ancestral memory and present collapse, public anger and inward reckoning, Eze stands in the blaze as both shield and signal. What endures is a poetry of resistance tempered by tenderness, willing to singe the tongue, if only to keep truth from being cauterised into silence.”

—Okechukwu Uwaezuoke, Editor, Arts and Review, THISDAY

“James Eze is possessed by the benevolent spirit of divine poetry of uncommon consistency and abiding accomplishment. In the rarefied realm of the cognoscenti of poetic lore there is the troublesome bogey that a highly successful first collection is almost always an impossible jinx to surmount, yet without breaking a sweat James Eze upped the ante on his award-winning debut outing, dispossessed, with his critically acclaimed second act, goosebumps. Now he has in his third collection, unbind me now, outdone himself with sublime poetry that bears the banner of a contemporary classic. Here is the unbounded monument of a master poet of the age.”

—Uzor Maxim Uzoatu: author of God of Poetry

“Unbind Me Now reads like a long vigil kept by firelight—sometimes blazing, sometimes reduced to embers, but never extinguished. It is the work of a poet who believes that language still matters when nations falter, when memory is threatened, and when the earth itself seems to grieve. One closes the book not consoled, but awakened—and that, perhaps, is the highest calling of poetry in our time.”

—Prof. Anayo Nkamnebe, Faculty of Management Sciences, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka, Anambra State

“In a country ravaged by corruption, brutality, and injustice, a voice rises—unrested, unafraid. It is the burning indignation of a conscience that refuses to slumber, of human dignity and truth that will not bend or yield. This voice is both beacon and battle cry, summoning courage in an age of moral collapse. Like a barrage of cannonade fire, Eze's words fly forth like a flaming hail of barbed arrows through the darkness, unerring, striking at the heart of tyranny and violence. They carry a pious and fiery wrath, roaring defiance against every violation, every stolen life, every silenced truth. Each verse becomes a stone hurled at the Goliaths of oppression, a verbal reprisal that names wrongdoing and demands reckoning. This voice is a sword of justice—sharp, deliberate, unsheathed and dangerously gleaming. It is a grieving outcry for the innocent brutalized, the displaced forgotten, the dead buried without justice. It mourns, but it also mobilizes. Unbind Me Now stands as a testament to resistance, a declaration of solidarity, and a silvery shining herald of morning's dawn, breaking through victoriously from the darkness of night.”

—Onesi Taiwo Dominic, author of The Mirror