Nigerian poet Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is set to release his latest poetry collection, The Naming, on December 1, 2025.
Published by the University of Nebraska Press as part of the African Poetry Book Series, the collection delves into themes of identity, ancestry, and postmodern existence, offering readers a poetic journey that spans history, kinship, and memory.
Ezenwa-Ọhaeto, a celebrated poet and Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has garnered multiple literary accolades. He was a runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition in Canada (2023) and has won prestigious awards such as the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize and the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize. His works have appeared in literary publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, and Colorado Review.
In The Naming, Ezenwa-Ọhaeto explores the intricate relationship between personal and collective histories, drawing inspiration from Igbo ontology and familial ancestry. The collection reimagines moments from the past and reinterprets them within the context of the present and future, offering a profound meditation on migration, heritage, and self-discovery.
Author of The Everyday Wife and Ice Cream Headache In My Bone, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers praised the collection saying;
“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 themselves, 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.”
Additionally author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022 and The Absurd Man Major Jackson, in his words says:
“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.”
Readers eager to explore The Naming can pre-order the collection through Amazon.
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
