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Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection explores a son’s relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States.
Nebeolisa's poems highlight how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical, and at times, emotional, distance between them. He wonders: “I don’t understand / her smile or why she would be submerged / in pain and wouldn’t want to admit it. / Who did this to our mothers?” The book questions his Nigerian mother’s need to act brave and a son’s need to protect.
Terminal Maladies reminds us that grief is inevitable, yet unique to each of us, and serves as a tribute to Nebeolisa’s mother and is a necessary read for anyone who has faced the challenges of caring for a loved one.
"Nebeolisa’s poems are rich with familial and emotional nuances, and are left artfully unresolved. A robust assemblage of dreamscapes, conversations, prayers, and meditations on life and death, this collection humanely reckons with the realities of losing a parent." —Publishers Weekly
"'Because the growl of thunder was distant,' the speaker notes in Terminal Maladies, 'I completely ignored it.' The mere mention of the far-off rumbling, however, means otherwise. This thunderous collection considers the space between attention and abstraction, between life and death. Which is another way to say love." —Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
"Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut, Terminal Maladies, introduces a poet so skillful and original that his book represents a vital moment in contemporary poetry. . . . Unsparing and yet infinitely tender, these are major poems. They will be with us for a long time to come." —Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
"Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies is an unflinching debut wrought by the power of naming, the power of image, a mother’s belief in the power of prayer. Clear-eyed but abashed, this collection insists on the necessity of memory and the inevitability of elegy. Nebeolisa’s speaker is at once vulnerable and indifferent, yet I felt undone by the speaker’s love for mother and depth of feeling for home no matter the distance." —Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations
"Terminal Maladies is a book measured in distance from mother—our first other. In these heartfelt but unerringly unsentimental poems, birth, the differentiation of self, migration, and death are plotted as points along a continuum; the emigrée’s geographic separation from his ailing mother presages the ultimate, unfordable one, just as the poet’s estrangement of syntax mirrors interior dislocations. Okwudili Nebeolisa is a poet of subtlety and surprise, in whose voice his mother’s, on the other end of the line, still reverberates." —Jameson Fitzpatrick, author of Pricks in the Tapestry