Your Crib, My Qibla: (African Poetry Book)

Derek 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments     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    

About the Author :
Saddiq Dzukogi holds a degree in mass communication from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria), and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A 2017 finalist of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Dzukogi’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, African American Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere.

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: Poems