Terminal Maladies
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Tender poetry chronicling a son’s relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States.
Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a Nigerian mother and son. Throughout the book, Nebeolisa navigates the guilt of starting a new life in the United States, far away from his home country and from his mother, who is battling cancer.
Depicting tender moments between mother and son, Terminal Maladies highlights how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical and emotional distance between them. He reflects on the reasons behind his Nigerian mother’s withholding, questioning her need to act bravely alongside his own assumed role as her protector.
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In this tender debut, Nebeolisa witnesses and mourns the death of his mother from cancer, recounting how a "seed-like tumor/ been in her thigh for twenty-seven years" grew to the size of a "pumpkin." Nebeolisa's attention to his mother's changing body is meticulously and compassionately observed, from "the chemo rash/ on the back of her hand" to her coughing, "like the sound/ of maize seeds in the maws of a grinder." Compounding the poet's grief is his move from Nigeria to the United States for his education, which diminishes his relationship with his mother to phone calls and gnaws him with guilt: "I did not want to describe the little things/ I was enjoying in the US," he confesses, "the endless days of uninterrupted electricity." His mother—steadfast, warm, and rooted in faith—responds with love, support, stoicism, and sadness, as does his sister, who becomes their mother's end-of-life caregiver. Nebeolisa's poems are rich with familial and emotional nuances, and are left artfully unresolved. A robust assemblage of dreamscapes, conversations, prayers, and meditations on life and death, this collection humanely reckons with the realities of losing a parent.
