By and large, we find in Umukoro’s Fenestration, poems that are alive, awake and aware; poems that sometimes tilt towards the desire of breaking the fourth wall.
Four years after winning the Brunel International prize for African Poetry, Othuke Umukoro published his debut poetry collection, Fenestration, which won the 2024 X.J Kennedy Prize, via Texas Review Press (2025).
Praised by Mark Levine for its blend of lush lyricism with observational directness, the poems in the book no doubt brim with echoes of a voice that is both urgent and calm, both desperate in its plunging back into memory and disciplined in the way it approaches its subject. And if there is an instance to agree with Salvatore Quasimodo that poetry is a “revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal, which the reader recognises as his own”, then it is with Umukoro’s collection. Through its pages, one encounters a vast range of themes—most of which are perfectly laid out—and lines as timeless as they are emotional…