Poetry Reading: Michael Imossan at Boswell Book Company *OFF-SITE*
In person at Boswell Book Company (2559 N Downer Ave., Milwaukee)
Join our friends at Boswell Book Company as they welcome Michael Imossan, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for first full-length collection, All That Refuses to Die.
Imossan's debut collection brims with stories and memories that evoke as well as provoke. As he moves through historical places, the poet compares the past with the present and finds that nothing has really changed. Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean.
Poet Fady Joudah says: "Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true.”
Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet of Ibibio origin. He is curator of the poetry column for Nigerian NewsDirect, poetry editor for the Chestnut Review, and author of the chapbooks For the Love of Country and Memory and The Smell of Absence, which was selected for inclusion in Kumi Na Moja: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set. He is a recipient of a PEN International writers’ grant.