Description
Book SynopsisDerek Walcott Prize for Poetry Winner
Julie Suk Award Winner
Nigeria Prize for Literature shortlist
Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father’s pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living.Culminating in an imagined dialogue between the father and his deceased daughter in the intricate space of the family,
Your Crib, My Qibla explores grief, the fleeting nature of healing, and the constant obsession of memory as a language to reach the dead.
Trade Review"A heartbreaking book of poems,
Your Crib, My Qibla journeys through a father's grief after the loss of his beloved daughter. It takes admirable courage and striking language to seek solace after experiencing the unimaginable."—Rigoberto González,
Oprah Daily"
Your Crib, My Qibla is perfect for someone who needs to be held in the body until the 'mind feels like a mind.'"—Amanda Auerbach,
Kenyon Review"Dzukogi’s
Your Crib, My Qibla will join a list of collections by some of the most notable new African voices in the continent and in the diaspora, whose books have been published by the University of Nebraska Press."—Ernest O. Ogunyemi,
Open Country“In Saddiq Dzukogi’s
Your Crib, My Qibla the loss of his daughter becomes the navigational pull to an interiority steeped in earthly grief and a desire for the unseen spaces of the afterlife. With incredible fidelity Dzukogi unravels a series of poems that wrestle with his loss and make meaning of our most unbearable moments. His is a song of embodied witness and recollection shaped by a voice skilled in the musicality of duality. These are poems that find their way to the reader’s depth and open a window to the otherworld.”—Matthew Shenoda, author of
Tahrir Suite “‘Where your headstone was, I put a mirror, / each time I come to visit / I see that you live in my face,’ writes Saddiq Dzukogi in this heartbreaking, powerful collection of poems. A love song, an elegy, a book-long sequence,
Your Crib, My Qibla is a parent’s epistles to a deceased child, an exploration of pain that continues to sing through pain (‘your songs endure // inside his bones. / They will nourish the loneliness— / yours and his.’). The mourning here is endless and yet transformative (‘Today Baha is not dead; she is six years old, / forcing marshmallows into his mouth. / Says I’m grown enough to feed you, Abba, / with the future’). Impossible not to be moved by this voice of a father who sees a dead child’s face everywhere (‘He presses a deep kiss on your grave, / on your forehead’), by this need to pull the dead out of the ground. This is a stunning, memorable book.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Deaf Republic and
Dancing in Odessa“Saddiq Dzukogi’s
Your Crib, My Qibla signals the arrival of a poet of assured craft, of courageous sentiment, and one who possesses a capacious facility with language and musicality. In this collection Dzukogi offers an elegy to innocence and to the false security of the living, and yet he demonstrates that the art of lamentation is as forceful an expression of hope as we have available to us. This is a remarkable introduction to a poet for our moment and time.”—Kwame Dawes author of
Nebraska: PoemsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
I. Your Crib
Wineglass
Song to a Birdwoman
Internment
Burial Sheet
So Much Memory
Scarf
The Fruit Tree
A Nimble Darkness
He Didn’t Get to Say Goodbye
The House Held by Chaos
Marshmallow
Enigma
Palms
Shoes
Measurable Weight
The Gown
This Web
Shattered
A Kind of Burden
Learning about Constellations
Elegy
Quenching
Back to Life
Ba Shi, Ba Shi
The Conceit of Shadows
Strain
Window
Is Memory in Her Brother’s Body?
Dates
Ribbons
Revival
Cave
Sufficient
Chibi
Shahada
Seismic
The Breadth of a Butterfly
Flower’s Tenderness
Memories by the Sea
When He Says Your Name
A Song in the Mouth of a Ghost
Half-Light
What Belongs to Him
Aubade
II. My Qibla—A Dialogue
She Begins to Speak
Journey Home
Still-Life
Janazah
Observations
Measuring the Length of Grief by the Length of a River
Ummi
Unexpressed Grief
My Son Asks if I Miss My Daughter
At Your Grave I’m Reminded of the Day You Were Born
Where Pain Lives
December
Inner Songs
Waterlog
One Year After
Notes
