Terminal Maladies

Okwudili Nebeolisa author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Autumn House Press

Published:13th Dec '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Terminal Maladies cover

Tender poetry chronicling a son’s relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States.
 
Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a Nigerian mother and son. Throughout the book, Nebeolisa navigates the guilt of starting a new life in the United States, far away from his home country and from his mother, who is battling cancer.

Depicting tender moments between mother and son, Terminal Maladies highlights how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical and emotional distance between them. He reflects on the reasons behind his Nigerian mother’s withholding, questioning her need to act bravely alongside his own assumed role as her protector.  
 

"Nebeolisa’s poems are rich with familial and emotional nuances, and are left artfully unresolved. A robust assemblage of dreamscapes, conversations, prayers, and meditations on life and death, this collection humanely reckons with the realities of losing a parent." * Publishers Weekly *
“‘Because the growl of thunder was distant,’ the speaker notes in Terminal Maladies, ‘I completely ignored it.’ The mere mention of the far-off rumbling, however, means otherwise. This thunderous collection considers the space between attention and abstraction, between life and death. Which is another way to say love.” -- Nicole Sealey, author of "The Ferguson Report: An Erasure"
“Nebeolisa’s debut, Terminal Maladies, introduces a poet so skillful and original that his book represents a vital moment in contemporary poetry. Centering around the loss of the poet’s mother, these poems match acute observation with abiding sympathy. Masterful with formal as well as free verse, Nebeolisa moves beyond mere technique: his lines and sentences render the people he portrays with agile care. They also reveal, with often disarming immediacy, a writer capable of remaining in uncertainty and still determined to face unanticipated, often painful truths. Unsparing and yet infinitely tender, these are major poems. They will be with us for a long time to come.” -- Peter Campion, author of "One Summer Evening at the Falls"
"Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies is an unflinching debut wrought by the power of naming, the power of image, a mother’s belief in the power of prayer. Clear-eyed but abashed, this collection insists on the necessity of memory and the inevitability of elegy. Nebeolisa’s speaker is at once vulnerable and indifferent, yet I felt undone by the speaker’s love for mother and depth of feeling for home no matter the distance." -- Donika Kelly, author of "The Renunciations"
"Terminal Maladies is a book measured in distance from mother—our first other. In these heartfelt but unerringly unsentimental poems, birth, the differentiation of self, migration, and death are plotted as points along a continuum; the émigré’s geographic separation from his ailing mother presages the ultimate, unfordable one, just as the poet’s estrangement of syntax mirrors interior dislocations. Nebeolisa is a poet of subtlety and surprise, in whose voice his mother’s, on the other end of the line, still reverberates." -- Jameson Fitzpatrick, author of "Pricks in the Tapestry"

ISBN: 9781637680940

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 8mm

Weight: 141g

80 pages