DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiquing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics.
The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two published collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and the volume includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley’s introduction contextualizes Otiono’s work within the frame of physical and spiritual mobility, diaspora, and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an interview of the poet by Chris Dunton that touches on the nature of poetry, language loss, and diasporic identities.

Nduka Otiono is an Associate Professor of African Studies and English at Carleton University in Ottawa. Formerly a journalist and General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors, his publications include two poetry books and a collection of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife, winner of the ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction.

Nduka Otiono's profile page

Peter Midgley is a poet and storyteller. He has performed in several countries around the world and has published three children’s books, one of which, Thuli’s Mattress, won the International Board on Books for Young People Award for Literacy Promotion and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. He is also the author of two plays and a bilingual volume of poems, perhaps i should / miskien moet ek, which appeared with Kalamalka Press in 2010. A second collection of poetry, Unquiet Bones, will be published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2015.

Peter Midgley's profile page

Nduka Otiono is an Associate Professor of African Studies and English at Carleton University in Ottawa. Formerly a journalist and General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors, his publications include two poetry books and a collection of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife, winner of the ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction.

Chris Dunton's profile page

• Winner, African Literature Association Award for Creative Writing
• Short-listed, Archibald Lampman Award

DisPlace is the contradictory being of Nduka Otiono: He’s “here” in Canada, but he’s also a dissident resident of Nigeria. He exists in the self-appointed Shangri-La that is the once-boastfully slaveholding Americas; but he insists on remaining the anointed exorcist of an Africa still decadent with bullets, with “militicians,” who play baboons rather than messiahs.

George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, 2016-17, George Elliott Clarke