NOW AVAILABLE FROM ICE FLOE PRESS
Autobiography of Water is the 2nd chapbook by Bola Opaleke to be published by Ice Floe Press. A magnificent, magical and complex journey by this significant voice in Canadian diaspora poetics, Bola, originally from Nigeria, lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He writes with intensity, depth and wisdom about pain, illness, history, ancestors, and the diaspora experience. Bola packs lifetimes in a 35pg opus that we are honored to be publishing at Ice Floe Press in these difficult times, where voices of desire, hope and the struggle for change and social justice are more than ever needed in a world often seemingly engaged on some tragic course to repeat the most dangerous mistakes.
Cover art by Canadian artist Cathy Daley
from HERE COMES THE SUN
For you, Diaspora. This is who I become.How was I supposed to know
that when I touched the hem of your voice
my fingers would get burnt? You have built fire
inside the wind of your name. For me,
everything the African sun touches turns to ashes-
we live in a city of wild ghosts.
City built to be destroyed. Brick after brick.
Rubble after rubble. We carry the instincts
of smoke – always running away
from what created it.
from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WATER
& this is how the story goes
our ancestors dissolve & become lilies
& become water in the belly of the sea.
we squandered every comma in our sentences
to make room for children to be squeezed
into that family photo hung on the wall of its flowing
ADVANCED PRAISE
In Autobiography of Water Bola Opaleke builds a lyric cartography of Black life across oceans, borders, and bodies. These poems move between West Africa and the Prairies, oil-slicked deltas and frozen rivers, mother tongues and the clipped grammar of immigration forms. Water here is landscape, ancestry, extraction, grief, and stubborn survival, carrying the drowned, the disappeared, and the dispersed into the present tense of the speaker’s body Be ready to be moved, unsettled, and instructed in equal measure as Opaleke teaches you how to read the world again through the restless, remembering face of water.– Adedayo Agarau, author of The Years of Blood Bola Opaleke’s Autobiography of Water intones the primordial tales dark lips once dared not utter, now gloriously speaking truth to power. With the unexpected potency of generational grief and loss, and the distinctive rebirth o diasporic nativities, Opaleke presents a collection filled with stories we must tell our children of coffins kicked open from the inside, of Nature bearing witness to the beauty bursting from melanated skin, of the divinity found in the bodies of mothers, mother tongues, and mother lands.
– Matthew E. Henry, author of The Colored page
