The world it seems cannot wait for Femi Morgan’s new poetry book “The Year of fire”, s it hs been causing excitement since its release and it’s easy to see why.
Femi Morgan, a Nigerian writer, media consultant and arts curator has been one of the most consistent poets in the country having written six books of poetry, Silent Drummings (2008), Poetry of People (eds 2015), Song of Travel (2016), Whispers (2019), Renegade (2019), and now The Year of Fire (2020). released a new book TheYear of Fire to the reading public.
The book, according to a statement, is a collection of poems published by Baron’s Cafe, an imprint of Fairchild Media.
Another reason The Year of Fire, the statement for the release says, explores rage and anxiety in national and cosmopolitan Nigeria spaces. The book engages the current poetic mutations where oralist, modernist styles are moulded into verses that reach the senses within and beyond the frame of Nigerian poetic tradition.
Yet another, the poems are bold, clear, thoughtful, visible, and tangible.
The poems on Oshodi, for instance, assert a time frame for the collection. Part of the collection was curated when the writer took his observer’s brush to listen to the colours of language of the suburbs.
Other poems are markers of this poetic engagement that resonate with the period of the COVID19 lockdown.
The Year of Fire was first published internationally within a collective of Black poets and writers. The book can be found on Amazon as well as on the Baron’s Cafe website.
All previous works have received critical reviews, have contributed to poetry subgenres, and have relatively become markers of time, landscape and age.
Femi Morgan was longlisted for the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation Prize in 2015 and was selected for the Writivism Poetry Workshop in the same year. He is also the author of Renegade. Renegade has been shortlisted for the 2019 Pius Adesanmi Memorial Prize for Literature, selected amongst the 2019 Lagos Book and Arts Festival books, LABAF, and is currently being translated to Portuguese. Femi Morgan has also curated art and culture projects for more than ten years. He is married to a chef, they live on the edge of Lagos, Nigeria.
