Masobe Books has acquired the publishing rights to Jazz Negotiations, the highly sought third poetry collection by Nigerian poet and pianist Echezonachukwu Nduka.
Jazz Negotiations, praised by NLNG Nigeria Prize for Poetry winner Obari Gamba as a “collection of lovely poems,” maintains Nduka’s intersectional musico-poetic lens as it engages histories, identities, and quotidian realities, seeking to reconceptualise Africanness.
The collection features verses that travel through space and time across Nigeria and the United States, stopping in cities, amplifying voices, examining racial tensions, and questioning belief, while embodying the borderless natures of grief and joy, sound and silence, and the unending possibilities of language. In Jazz Negotiations, poetry is the framework, and jazz the analytical tool Nduka uses to interrogate the abstractness and tactility of the African imagination.
Echezonachukwu Nduka previously published two poetry collections: the critically acclaimed Chrysanthemums for Wide-eyed Ghosts (Griots Lounge, 2018), his debut exploring the intersections of death, love, music, wine, and the otherworldly; and Waterman (Griots Lounge, 2020), its successor, which situates itself in enchanting musicality while exploring themes of innocence, memory, religion, music, and the complex corridors of political history. Jazz Negotiations, six years later, intensifies Nduka’s poetic journey and complements his musical inquiry.
As a recording artist and performer, Nduka focuses primarily on art music for piano by composers of African descent and performs a recital series titled Resounding African Pianism. He has recorded three EPs and an album, The African Serenades, described by Afrocritik as an “intense, emotive listening experience.” Nduka is a Booth-Ferris Graduate Fellow, Benjamin Franklin Fellow, and PhD student in Music Studies (Ethnomusicology) at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.
His scholarly interests include critical perspectives on African pianism, African art music, religious aesthetics in African popular music, music and philosophy, performance studies, and the nexus between music and postcolonial Anglophone literatures, particularly poetry and nonfiction. His current research focuses on spatial locations and the politics of place, programming, meaning-making, and performance practice in African pianism.
Jazz Negotiations joins other recently announced forthcoming Masobe poetry collections by Nigerian poets, including The Origin of Wounds by Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, A Museum of Unfinished Men by Kukogho Iruesiri Samson, The Years of Blood by Adedayo Agarau, The Inventory for Lost Things by Abubakar Ibrahim, A Poet’s Attempt to Freeze Time by Alhanislam, Memory of Departure by Ismail Bala, and Kill the Poet, Save the World by Abdulkareem Baba Aminu.
The collection is set for release on 20 March 2026 and will be available in bookstores nationwide the following weekend.
