Facing You: City Lights Spotlight No. 19

Description

From acclaimed Nigeria-born, Brooklyn-based poet Uche Nduka, a book of love poems written with compact elegance and vivid eroticism. "The real in Nduka's work carries the resonance not only of his Nigerian identity and experience of political violence but also the dislocation of the emigre and the frightening power relations of intimacy as mapped onto the lyric."-Joyelle McSweeney, Boston Review Facing You is a collection of love lyrics, as well as an exploration of what goes into making the public and private self, from acclaimed Nigerian American poet Uche Nduka. Passionate and erotic, Facing You nonetheless resists being hermetically sealed within the relationship, and is subject to the intrusions of "the dubious world": war, exile, protest, and police violence intrude but cannot defeat Nduka's expressions of desire, where reality and surreality are one. "These poems were written openly and freely about my vision and experience," he writes, "crossing the wires of sex and prophecy."

Uche Nduka is an itinerant poet and professor presently living in Brooklyn. He was born in Nigeria, was raised bilingual in Igbo and English, and earned his BA from the University of Nigeria. He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. In 2007, he immigrated to the United States, where he would earn his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn. Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including the U.S.-published books Living in Public (2018), Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007). His work has been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian.

Praise for Facing You: "Nduka's erotic poems are gentle, tender, and, for the most part, quite hot. ... but such moments are surprising when they crop up, piquant or musty turns, unexpected and emphatic shots of physical punctation. More often, the poems' erotic elements are part of a more general heightened, sexualized atmosphere, a kind of free-floating horniness or 'beautiful confusion' in which the desire to merge with the beloved is inextricable from the desire to create. ... Facing You is by no means entirely erotica; it touches on a wide range of experience, including Nduka's own Nigerian-American identity and the social crises of our moment."-Mark Scroggins, Hyperallergic Praise for Uche Nduka: "To my reading, all of Nduka's work is Surreal, and in this sense it is all political. The real is not paraphrased or commented on by Surrealism but convulses through it. The real in Nduka's work carries the resonance not only of his Nigerian identity and experience of political violence but also the dislocation of the emigre and the frightening power relations of intimacy as mapped onto the lyric."-Joyelle McSweeney, Boston Review "He has of necessity had to find in poetry a means of survival and a method for fighting back. No way to set aside the scars, the disappointment, and the social rage, and go on to write a poetry of reflective personal feeling. Also, it would seem, no way straightforwardly to attempt to describe or depict the immensity of what has been experienced and felt-writing would have to take you beyond that to a more total or global sense of engagement with language as defiance, as hope, hope not for a probably impossible political solution to the chaos, but hope for a present, in writing, in which sanity and endurance prevail, even as the pain is confronted head-on. At any rate, this seems to be what Nduka's writing does. Poetry as path or weapon-as life."-Norman Fischer, Jacket2 "Nduka is always a bold writer, but more than anything he's an incredibly smart and precise one. Nduka is a writer who shows his work and still surprises you."-Gabriel Ojeda-Sague