All That Refuses to Die - (African Poetry Book) by Michael Imossan (Paperback)

About the Book

All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the conditions of Africans through a historical lens, comparing the past with the present and finding that nothing has really changed.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets

All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean.

All that Refuses to Die is a collection that brims with stories and memories that evoke as well as provoke. As he moves through historical places, the poet compares the past with the present and finds that nothing has really changed.

Review Quotes

"What is impressing me about Michael Imossan's work is the manner in which he is negotiating multiple 'influences' and compulsions as a poet, for these manifest themselves in his lyricism and his engagement with a personal narrative of self and self-identity as well as his own wrestling with the influence of tradition. It is telling that were we to list the personages that appear in his epigraphs and, to some extent, in his allusions, we will understand Imossan to be fully ensconced in contemporary world literature. And yet we will also see the extent to which he has become immersed in the varied milieu of contemporary African poetry."--Kwame Dawes, from the foreword

"Michael Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true."--Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic and Tethered to Stars

About the Author

Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet of Ibibio origin. He is curator of the poetry column for Nigerian NewsDirect, poetry editor for the Chestnut Review, and the author of the award-winning chapbook For the Love of Country and Memory. Imossan's second chapbook, The Smell of Absence, was selected for inclusion in Kumi Na Moja: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set. He is a recipient of a PEN International writers' grant. Kwame Dawes is a professor of literary arts at Brown University and the director and series editor of the African Poetry Book Fund.