Written as a tribute to family, place, and bodily awareness, Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s poems speak of love, war, violence, language, immigration, and exile. From a baby girl’s penchant for her parents’ keys to a warrior’s hunt for words, Wa Ngugi’s poems move back and forth between the personal and the political. In the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, the biting winds of Boston, and the heat of Nairobi, Wa Ngugi is always mindful of his physical experience of the environment. Ultimately it is among multiple homes, nations, and identities that he finds an uneasy peace.
Ngugi’s poetry, like the poet himself, is the product of a lifetime suspended between disparate locations. In Logotherapy, the reader finds him pursuing meaning in his memories and experiences stretched between the urban jungles of Nairobi and Boston alike. His measured lines unspool precisely and draw the reader into the landscapes that his imagination inhabits.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s potent second poetry volume is a wide-ranging collection that returns again and again to its themes of memory, displacement, kinship, and in keeping with the book’s title, to an insistence upon meaning, to language’s ability to forge and uncover lived and felt relationships to place, nation, and family.
© Mukoma Wa Ngugi, 2018. All rights reserved.