Fenestration: Poems - Paperback

by Othuke Umukoro (Author)

Winner of The 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss

Fenestration excavates public and private history. The poems here bristle with striking clarity and immediacy while compellingly confronting subjects such as the transatlantic slave trade, familial memory, HIV, environmental perils, and more. What happened inside those slave forts in Ghana, Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Africans were immured for weeks, sometimes months, before facing the horror of the Middle Passage? How does one carry the memory of his dead father? Fenestration, among other things, throbbing with an unflinching consciousness that splices history and memory, unfolds powerfully.

Author Biography

OTHUKE UMUKORO, Nigerian poet and playwright, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he won the Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. His debut poetry collection, Fenestration (TRP, 2025), was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss as the winner of The 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Winner of the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize, Othuke has taught at the University of Iowa and was the inaugural X. J. Kennedy Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.