Grief peels layers off our being, and brings us face-to-face with our frailties and finiteness, so is Nka! —a collection of poetry that documents the poet's encounter with loss. The poet's reflections spawn an agony that is both raw and urgent, building up to a crescendo and erupting into a metamorphosis, in the poet-personas. Since language lacks the flexibility to truly articulate pain, we need to paint pictures of grief, to draw into our experiences, to reach for poignant moments, and to humanise them. Nka! is a reflection of that arduous attempt of negotiating memory through the poet's identity.
Nwachukwu Egbunike – publisher, social media scholar and writer – lives in Ibadan, Nigeria. Egbunike is the author of Dyed Thoughts: a conversation in and from my country (2012), Blazing Moon (joint first runner-up of the 2015 Association of Nigeria Authors’ Prize for Poetry), and Hashtags: social media, politics and ethnicity in Nigeria (2018).