Bold, wry, and lyrical musings.
A snarky and brooding collection from a veteran poet.
Akinyemi’s seventh poetry collection presents cynical and sarcastic observations about social and political life. The poems—some in free verse, others rhymed and metered—are sorted into three sections: “Writing People,” “Writing the Writer,” and “Writing the World.” The works are preoccupied with toxic, painful relationships between spouses and families, pastors and religious believers, communities and politicians—with particularly bitter words for what the poet characterizes as Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s “meaningless change.” Poisonous communication styles come to the fore in the multipart titular poem, whose main characters take turns objectifying and hurting one another: Akinyemi rhymes abuse and muse and compares a partner’s sayings to spider poison. The author’s gaze sweeps across TV screens and internet browsers, condemning Instagram and the “venom” of “fake news.” He also conjures cultural environments, including scenes in Nigeria (he remembers “Grandma’s Red Soup” and the texture of garri-ijebu flour) and Great Britain, where racism simmers and an accent is “a spoiler alert…my origin wrapped / in eggshells.” Despite Akinyemi’s sardonic tones, some poems effectively give readers the sense that he’s advocating for sincerity. In one poem, two “imperfect people hunt for perfect partners” and ultimately work toward a resolution: “we laid our imperfections bare on the dinner table, / found closure and gave it another go.” At times, the poems feel self-important and overly dramatic, as when one speaker derides his “favour-hungry friends” for comparing him to writer Wole Soyinka even as he bemoans his own “untapped talent.” Still other poems expressively note that redemption can be found in prayer, “the school of life,” or the act of writing itself. One poem, for instance, asserts that writing is a cleansing act: “a writer is a laundry man— / he will wash your dirty laundry without a fuss.” Just in case, though, the speaker also preempts attacks on his own imperfections: “don’t be that bibliophile who is on the hunt for errors…let the love that beamed through these pages erase my scars.”
Bold, wry, and lyrical musings.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-913636-08-1
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Roaring Lion Newcastle Ltd
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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