The Reading Warehouse

In this volume, Oboido sings of and powerfully negotiates the Africa that is alive and strong alongside the new world, where "the traveler washes his migrant feet / with the wetness of dawn" and where "the road has mouth like a boa." This is a book filled with wisdom of a poet that fearlessly takes us by the hand into a world beyond the metaphor of home, opening us to new images that are African and yet not so African. Sometimes, in lyrical narrative, the poet juxtaposes western cities with African cities, challenging our image of Lagos, London, and New York, bringing us along his journey from the hills of Kisii into Nairobi, and then to the plains of Kitengela and back home to Nigeria, West Africa, because the poet is "bound by no birth cord."