Entries by Dami Ajayi

Picking the Grievous Bones of Disaffection

Every poet is in search of something. This “thing” – sometimes called a poetics – describes the philosophical criteria and aesthetic codes that connect a poet’s discourse to meaning and life. Yeats, in his later years, pursued to track reality and its imperfections; Heaney sought a “clarification of life….a stay against confusion”; and Jay Wright, […]

The Rovingheights Bestseller List 2022: Presented with Open Country Mag

very end of the year, since 2020, Rovingheights has shared an informal list of the top-selling titles in its stores. As Nigeria’s biggest literary bookstore, Rovingheights is a pillar of the reading community, providing books that other stores in the country might not have thought to stock. Late last year, its co-founder Tobi Eyinade asked Open Country Mag editor Otosirieze to collaborate on the store’s third […]

Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices

Edited by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond. HarperVia, $27.99 (480p) ISBN 978-0-06-308904-4 Brew-Hammond delivers an impressive anthology of short stories, essays, and poetry by writers from across Africa. In the Sudanese writer Reem Gaafar’s “Finding Descartes,” a school teacher becomes an activist after meeting a smart, young boy who ought to be in school, but isn’t. Rwandese-born […]

A Quick History of Afrobeats

A Quick Ting on Afrobeats hardly reflects on moral conundrums. Seemingly obsessed with Black pride and optimism, Adofo’s book embraces a positive outlook and perhaps this is the right attitude to afrobeats. Quick Ting on Afrobeats is the latest addition to the growing corpus of the ‘A Quick Ting’ book series commissioned by Magdalene Abraha and published by Jacaranda books. Written by […]

The Pain and Healing of a Broken-hearted Poet

(A Review of Dami Ajayi’s Affection & Other Accidents, published by Radi8 Ltd., Lagos, Nigeria, 2022) By Aj. Dagga Tolar The therapeutic and healing properties of poetry are not necessarily definite for the genre, but they exist and can for poets provide all of the relief for the mind if taken up as a mirror of the self. For the man or woman who is heartbroken, poetry […]

The Anatomy of Silence & Other Poems

The Anatomy of Silence (For S.) What do I accept from this silence, this silence that lacerates peace, this silence, anathema to bliss. This silence, pensive, dramatic amping tension, wrecking intention, this silence, violent and vicarious, this silence between two lovers & two phones. This silence seems to say something, my bunny ears cocked at […]

Affection & Other Accidents – A Poet’s Grief and Vulnerability watermarked in this collection of poems

Dami Ajayi’s latest release “Affection & Other Accidents” is his third volume of poems, after his first volume “Clinical Blues” and his second collection, “A Woman’s Body is a Country” which were released to great acclaim. This new release reveals a poet at the peak of his literary powers. Like the title, “Affection & Other […]

Love and Death in Dami Ajayi’s A Woman’s Body Is a Country

Title: A Woman’s Body Is a Country  Author: Dami Ajayi Publisher: Ouida Books Number of pages: 69 Year of publication: 2017 Category: Poetry Dami Ajayi’s second collection, A Woman’s Body Is a Country, endeavours to carve a niche in the corpus of Nigerian poetry. In this collection, there are questions of affection and there is suggestiveness, both digging into the subject of […]