NOW AVAILABLE FROM ICE FLOE PRESS
Today, we take a break from the ongoing Dis/enchantment/ Anomie /Spectacle series with an announcement for all our subscribers: 2 years in the making — we are delighted and honored to share that AUTOBIOGRAPHY of WATER, a new chapbook by Winnipeg-based, Nigerian-Canadian poet Bola Opaleke is now available from Ice Floe Press
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WATER is now for sale at our Book (drop down menu and in our Catalogue store). Please click the link below for all details, direct link to the feature page which includes Canadian and international prices and excerpts from the collection, along with a special audio reading by Bola of the opening poem in the collection, ‘Here Comes the Sun.’
Autobiography of Water is the 2nd chapbook by Bola Opaleke to be published by Ice Floe Press. Bola, originally from Nigeria and a significant voice in Canadian diaspora poetics, takes the reader on a magnificent, magical and complex journey. He writes with a singular intensity, depth and wisdom about pain, illness, history, ancestors, and the diaspora experience. Bola packs lifetimes in a 35-page opus that we are honored to be publishing at Ice Floe Press in these difficult times, when voices of desire, hope and the struggle for change and social justice are needed more than ever in a world often seemingly on a tragic trajectory.
cover art: (c) Cathy Daley
To order Autobiography of Water, listen to Bola read an excerpt, and more information please click the box below which will take you to the press page for this astounding new collection by one of Canada’s finest poets.
back cover art (c) Cathy Daley
Advanced Praise
Bola Opaleke’s Autobiography of Water is an original call of the gripping voice vibrating through the latitude of memories, histories, and delicate contours of the wounds in a country left behind and the diasporic home. Opaleke writes in a self-conscious poetic grammar that captures the intense events of exploitation and the ongoing global capitalist crusade. In this chapbook, the currents of images are highly pixelated and move in well-calculated paces. With this rich investment in metaphors, he is a new-generation poet who shouldn’t be ignored! – Salawu Olajide, Author of Contraband Bodies
In Autobiography of Water, Bola Opaleke writes with a voice both tender and unflinching, tracing the restless currents of migration, memory and loss. Here, language flows like the element it names; fluid, luminous, drifting through the wreckage of empire and the ache of diaspora. Through poems that shimmer between prayer and testimony, Opaleke gathers the echoes of ancestral wisdom and the longing of exile, revealing how the body itself becomes a country of tides. From the haunted landscapes of West Africa to the cold prairies of Canada, Opaleke explores the fragile ecstasies of love and reclamation, always asking: what survives when language itself is wounded? A stunning meditation by a poet attuned to the pulse of displacement and the enduring music of reslience, where water is both witness and home – Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure, author of Weeping Tomato.
BIO
Bola Opaleke is the author of “Skeleton of a Ruined Song” published by Ice Floe Press (2019) and the winner of he 2020 Thomas Morton Prize in Poetry. A few of his poems have been published in journals including Prairie Fire, Frontier Poetry, Rattle, CBC Books, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, and many more. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB. Bola served as Arts Community Director with Winnipeg Arts Council Board of Directors.
