Architecture of Dust

A collection of poems to transport the reader on a literary journey of discovery through loss, love, family dispersion, and immigration. These poems drip with an alchemical admixture of tenderness, violence, despair, and hope, as testament to our resilience.The poems in Chike Nzerue's Architecture of Dust lance veins on pages with dialects of grief and love, through the prism of an immigrant singing America's gifts, the burden of its melting pot, disrupted kinships, race, and a reckoning of what it means to be a son, father, doctor, and citizen.Central to this collection is the idea of poetry as both music and vehicle to transport the reader from the streets of Nashville to London, to the lights of Las Vegas, skirting the nebulous notion of home, as the poems sweep from the edge of the Mojave Desert to Kano, Nigeria, at the fringe of the Sahara Desert. Although these worlds seem disparate, the poems reveal these worlds beautifully as one.The poems provide an unflinching portrait of colonial violence, cultural and family disruptions, love, racism, and loss, while making innovative leaps of faith with metaphor and language. The poems may seem immediate and contemporary, but still harken to tradition, lyrical insights, and narrative sweeps to shore up the reader's heart. The poems are an apophatic invitation and invocation of our unspoken common humanity."The poems in Chike Nzerue's Architecture of Dust attend to the senses in the ways only a physician-poet can: that is to say, they blur the boundaries between feeling and intellect, sensation and abstraction, and so forth. The result is a collection that resists the intelligence, as Wallace Stevens exhorts, 'almost successfully, ' and in doing so, guides readers toward a space of underexplored experiential terrain. Moreover, though Nzerue is a Romantic at heart--nods to Keats abound--he never gives in to that mode's troubling flourishes or indulgences. Rather, these poems bring us to the edge of reality full of pain, but rather than beautify it, or look away, they invite us to probe the intricacies of strong feeling, revealing its centrality to human feeling and human being."--John James"The best of these poems sparkle with arresting images and recall Okigbo's incantatory power. Nzerue displays versatility as he fashions memory, myth, and history into poems that evoke innocence, nostalgia, and loss."--Okey Ndibe, author of Foreig