Leaked Footages (African Poetry Book )
Description
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets
The poems in Leaked Footages carry urgent subjects, ranging from death to disappearance to grief to memory. Not only do the poems fulfill the tradition of witnessing often manifested in contemporary poets such as Garous Abdolmalekian and Ilya Kaminsky, but they extend that tradition by the medium through which they witness: the technical and the technological. Here, the camera, the closed-circuit TV, cinematographic techniques, and the cyborg are trusted for truth-telling. Reality is represented in footage seen through the eyes of multifaceted speakers.
In Abu Bakr Sadiq’s exploration of northern Nigeria in speculative poetry, the lyrical meets the chronicle. In this fusion of Afrofuturism with experimental poetic techniques, the reader witnesses a country ravaged by terrorism and the consequences of war, as well as the effects of these on those who survive. While the tone is grave with concern and conscience, the poems do not take the easy route of sentiment. Instead, attention is paid to structure—from the erasure poems that are informed by the theme of disappearance to the contrapuntal poems that are influenced by the testaments of leaving.
Praise for Leaked Footages (African Poetry Book )
“In Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Leaked Footages we encounter a speaker addressing us from a richly-imagined future while haunted by the past. The result is an interrogation of the many ways the world can end, the many scales of that apocalypse. These poems haunt me and teach me. Here is a poet I will follow into every future.”—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die
“In Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Leaked Footages we enter into a world concerned with untangling the ontological realities of our present-day. Populated with cyborgs and a speaker navigating the violence of their world, there is a deep yearning and precision in the language of these poems aimed at comprehending how we have come to engage one another. The poems here ask what it means to be a person, a Nigerian, a Muslim, in the face of a world so deeply adjudicated by conflict and the myriad lenses of technology. Mediated by the nuances of received narratives, intersecting histories, and family lineages, this book is at once deeply rooted and otherworldly, an oscillation between a kind of distant witnessing, and a meticulously intimate living. Each poem in this collection feels like an arrival!”—Matthew Shenoda, author of The Way of the Earth: Poems
