Naming

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is from Ishiowerre, Owerri-Nkworji, in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of the chapbook The Teenager Who Became My Mother. His work has won multiple awards and has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Malahat Review, Lolwe, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, LitMag, Colorado Review, Salamander, Oxford Poetry, and the Republic.

• Acknowledgments Our Fathers’ FathersA Call at Dawn Appraisal Unfurling Naming Marley’s Lyrics in Two Parts or Where Does It Hurt the Most? What I Said to God, Chukwu Ọ̀kịké The Story of Chinụalụmọgụ Not Looking for Anything with His Lazy Eyes Memorabilia What Chinụalụmọgụ Made with Clouds Once Upon a Time the Teeth The Navel Here The Actual Story About the Keloid on Chinụalụmọgụ’s Left Arm Colors The Gift Teaching My Nephew There Is a New Philosophy Now Called Kwechiri, to Persevere The Measure of Lost Things Itches The Robin in My Heart Worries Once Upon a Girl, a Place of History Chinụalụmọgụ Sits on His Balcony Pretending He Is a Parcel WorriesThe Teenager Who Became a Mother What They Say I Do Not Carry Well A Dead Son Does Not Answer the Phone The World Will Never Run Out of Bad News Ọzụbụlụ Úgà Monochrome Photos with Fragments in a Closet As Seeing Is a Kind of Brightness Okụzụ At the Darien Gap Dear HopeFinding Ìkwìkwíī, Sweet Night Bird, by the Lamp on a Dim-Lighted Street Ọbashị Confession Chinụalụmọgụ’s Therapist Kept Smiling at His Tricks Web A Page from Chinụalụmọgụ’s Diary Foregrounding Falling Oranges A Gift from Ọlisa Eloka, the One from Umuchu, to His Dearest Friend, Chinụalụmọgụ, Who Received It on the Afternoon of the Third Day After His Traditional Marriage to Mmesoma Mercy Clarity On Chinụalụmọgụ Once Living in Lincoln, Nebraska Forgiveness A Call’s Dusk Notes

“The Naming is the story of surrender, how the child surrenders to the parent, and the adult to the infant. Thus, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto creates themself, a poet, a multiplicity of voices, in language that is familiar but entirely new. Beginning with incantations, the collection seems to collect from antiquity and carry the reader on a current of sound through actual historical moments, reverie, confession, and fantasy. The poems recraft the traditional dialogue between life and magic, to the disturbances of the present, in a language that is vivid and resonant. These poems deliver us to the knowledge of what it means to be human, and African, in humor and reverence and wonder.”—Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, author of The Everyday Wife and ice cream headache in my bone “Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s The Naming engraves in language lineages that whisper through his fingers. And thus, he never separates himself from the grounding of his spiritual force fields. These poems, of such interior strength and wonder, intone wisdoms only found on the outskirts of our parochial facades. The result? The Naming makes peace with historical wounds and spurs us to live in complete astonishment.”—Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022 and The Absurd Man