what was the first thing that went through your mind-relief, disbelief, or a sense that the work had finally found its readers?
It was all three and more: relief, because I had been praying for it; disbelief, because the competition was fierce; and a sense that Unbind Me Now had found its readers. The book’s conceptual tapestry placed me as a voice of the people. This line in the title poem is not innocent: our hopes blaze in a soaring bonfire / the poet sits on the tongue of the inferno / a human shield against obstinate fate. It places the poet as conscience, burden-bearer and truth-speaker. That role was foreshadowed in Dispossessed: for i am the missing lobe of poetry’s kolanut / the fearless chest that absorbs the anger of razor blades / i surrender my anvil at the crossroads / and unscrew the cork on my silence. I finished Unbind Me Now in December 2025. On 11 February 2026 the English Department of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University honoured me as ‘The People’s Poet’-people who had not read the manuscript. Is that how life imitates art?
You were already long listed for Dispossessed in 2022. How does this shortlisting feel different?
Being shortlisted for Africa’s biggest literary prize carries real weight. Out of 223 books, mine was named among the three best poetry collections in Nigeria in 2026. I feel validated, noticed, seen. In the solitary business of writing, being seen is fulfilment. I am grateful to NLNG for that historic chance.
The judges singled out ‘fluid and aesthetically captivating language’ and a movement from dysfunction toward redemption. Does that match how you hear the book?
It does. It means I have found language strong enough to bear my feelings and still range as poetry. Toni Morrison wrote that we die-that may be the meaning of life-but we do language, and that may be the measure of our lives. I do language. When silence falls on all things concerning me, I hope the memory of what I did with language remains. I also deliberately wove hope into the poems. When a reader still meets we are not doomed / to the fate of our fathers / far from darkness / we are light or even the sky must weep / herself empty to summon / the light to birth a rainbow, they see that the book prophesies hope, not only gloom. The judges read that watermark correctly.
Standing beside Ifowodo and Oburumu-two very different poetic temperaments-what does this shortlist say about Nigerian poetry in 2026?
It is a huge honour to stand with Ogaga and Tares. The shortlist speaks to the growth of our poetry: diverse audiences, connected at Nigeria. Great poetry should address the dominant anxieties of its society. We all sought to treat global headaches from a Nigerian perspective.
Africa’s richest literary prize is also a public event. How do you want Unbind Me Now to be talked about if it does not win?
I do not enter a contest expecting to lose. I believe God, who led me this far, will crown the journey. That said, I want the book remembered as a watershed that spoke unwaveringly to the dominant issues of Nigeria in my time-the book whose impact rang loudest in recent memory.
Unbind Me Now
The title is a command. Who is being unbound-the speaker, the country, the reader, or all three?
It is a wake-up call, not a call to arms: a demand for immediate relief for a long-suppressed people. In the world of the book, poet, country, reader and fellow citizens are all in fetters. The poet speaks their most incendiary truths with candour.
Fire runs through the collection as revelation, rebuke and method. When did that metaphor take hold, and did you worry it would consume the quieter poems?
Fire arrived at the conceptual stage. It is physical-churches burnt, sacred objects destroyed, farmers charred in their sleep-and figurative: pent-up emotion and the country’s temperature. I did not worry it would consume quieter poems. Fire is the superstructure. A durable stem can bear extra load.
You have said the book grew out of ‘extreme displeasure’ and a wish to speak for the voiceless, while keeping art from being swallowed by anger. How did you manage that tension?
In a good poem every word must serve a predetermined end. Language, in competent hands, carries both life and death. I managed the tension by taking charge of language and sending it on an errand-fire and water in the same mouth.
Poems that name ‘unknown gunmen,’ burning flags and weaponised faith refuse neutrality. What is the difference between witness and propaganda?
My poetry is the voice of the streets. Those titles came from ordinary conversation; I cleaned and framed them. Who is better placed to write about ‘unknown gunmen’ than a poet who lives in the South-East, where their activities made life unbearable? Poetry must keep its pact with truth. Propaganda is manipulative and aims at a political end. Witnessing records the human condition. The poet of Unbind
Me Now is a witness to a traumatic period, not a propagandist.
The book moves from public blaze to inward reckoning-memory, inheritance, exile, pandemic silence, ecological grief. Was that architecture planned?
Deliberate in parts. Poems on George Floyd, Lekki Tollgate and COVID-19 were written as events happened, then joined a larger tapestry of anguish. Once the mental landscape was mapped, other poems queued behind the central theme.
Dispossessed was organised around innocence, transgression and atonement. Goosebumps was almost entirely about love. What did this third book demand that the first two could not meet?
Dispossessed maps the poet’s evolution. Goosebumps is the in-between experiment with a single theme.
Unbind Me Now continues that evolution, but the poet is no longer starry-eyed. The book demanded trenchant witnessing of a country in extreme distress-a rise to the tongue of the inferno, speaking artistic truth in thunder, lightning and rain.
You released it quietly on Good Friday rather than with a launch. Why that date, and why that restraint?
It was scheduled for Good Friday, then came earlier to meet a deadline. An introductory review had already announced the date. The book was released in silence because of its heavy thematic concerns. Loud celebration did not fit.
Craft and voice
You came to poetry through Gabriel Okara and have long kept company with Okigbo. What do you still steal from them, and where have you had to leave them behind?
Both ignited my imagination. I have drifted from Okara; Okigbo has stayed. Nobody steals from Okigbo comfortably-his genius hunts you. After reading that Ben Obumselu nudged him ‘towards greater clarity,’ I sought Obumselu out and learned the private meanings of some of Okigbo’s most recondite poems. In 2015 I co-founded Return 2 Idoto with Odili Ujubonu, the first poetry festival in the South-East, held at Ojoto by the Idoto River in Okigbo’s honour.
Critics talk about your language as both incantatory and accessible. How conscious are you of writing for the page and for the ear?
I am a journalist, trained to be accessible; a songwriter and speechwriter, trained to be understood; and a poet, charged to sound fresh and carve new idioms. I am bound to all of those things I have become.
Many of these poems feel like sermons that refuse the pulpit. Do you think of yourself as prophet, priest, pilgrim-or just a journalist who learned to sing?
All of those, and more. In a 2019 review of Dispossessed, Reuben Abati titled his piece ‘Here he comes: ‘Prophet, Priest and Pilgrim.” That tag has hung on my neck for seven years.
How do you know when a poem is finished-especially one that is also an accusation?
Is a poem ever finished? Okigbo wrote: And when you have done up my stitches / Wake me up near the altar / And this poem will be finished. Great poems provoke responses across generations. In Dispossessed I answered Eliot’s ‘April is the cruellest month’ with april is not ‘the cruellest month’ / i beg to differ, sir / for the seasons regain their footing with a stab of rain. Eliot started it; I continued it.
Another poet may pick up the thread. That is why it is hard to say a poem is finished.
Has living in Enugu, after years in Lagos newsrooms and government, changed the temperature of the work?
Enugu changed everything. Life is less cruel there; there is room to breathe. I wrote Dispossessed in Awka, Goosebumps and Unbind Me Now in Enugu. In Lagos I had no headroom for meaningful work.
Life before and beside the poems
You were a features writer at ThisDay, pioneer literary editor of Sunday Sun, a banker, a corporate communicator, and a governor’s spokesman. Which jobs most trained the poet, and which most threatened him?
All of them prepared me. Features taught story. Literary editing immersed me in literature as insider-outsider. Banking and corporate communications taught discipline and precision. Serving as a spokesman taught me that words have weight. Poetry needs all of these, in different degrees.
You helped start Chimamanda Adichie’s international creative writing workshops while at Fidelity Bank. What did that collaboration teach you about how literature travels in Nigeria?
It was defining. Serious writing is not merely physical labour. A good book in Nigeria still earns respect.
The idea that Nigerians do not read is a lie. Literature travels far here. Even as a little-known writer, friends and family hold me in high esteem. That is enough.
You have been called ‘the people’s poet.’ Is that a compliment you accept, or a burden?
It is an honour I carry with pride. Few Nigerian poets are celebrated by a university faculty. The English Department at COOU set aside a day for my work and, before the Vice Chancellor and scholars, gave me a plaque titled ‘The People’s Poet.’ A month earlier I had written ‘Voice of the Streets,’ a central poem of the new book. The challenge now is to carry that name with dignity.
Culture-building
Return to Idoto, A Flutter in the Woods, the Things Fall Apart Festival, Udala Nation-you keep building rooms for poetry to live in public. Why is the event as important as the book?
In my culture art is celebratory, and we do not celebrate in private. Events pass the torch. Strangers have known me from Flutter in the Woods; young writers remind me they were at the first Return to Idoto.
Events return attention to the book.
Udala Nation turns poems into songs. What does music give a poem that print cannot, and what does it take away?
Music and poetry are Siamese twins. Evocative, rhythmic poetry is called lyrical; a song rich in image and metaphor is called poetic. Udala Nation joins both so the feeling lives after the beat ends.
The udala tree, in your telling, is innocence and communal sharing. How much of that ethic is still possible in the Nigeria these new poems describe?
Communal sharing is still practised. Visit Igbo villages at Christmas: people reach out with whatever they have. It recalls children under the udala tree-when a fruit falls, it is shared so every playmate tastes it.
Nigeria, memory, the world
Unbind Me Now treats insecurity, political betrayal, racial injustice and ecological collapse as one crisis. Is that a poet’s metaphor or a diagnosis you stand by off the page?
Both. A forest fire does not pick its victims. Tomorrow in this country has rarely been better than yesterday-terror, abduction, fuel prices, economic displacement. How can a poet of conscience be quiet?
As the persona asks in ‘my roof is on fire’: how can i be quite / when my roof erupts in smoke / and vultures hover in the wincing skies?
Ancestral memory and Biafra still surface in your work. What is the risk of returning to those wounds, and of leaving them?
The tortoise travels with its house on its back; I am never without my ancestors. Biafra was prominent in Dispossessed, not directly in Unbind Me Now-where genocide is named, I had the Middle Belt in mind.
The memory should not be erased. Like Holocaust memory, it should warn that war is a road with no clear winner and only heavy losses.
You write of a country under siege and a world unravelling. Where do you still locate hope that is not sentimental?
In unexpected places: the woman walking her daughter to school through flooded Awka; the Benue farmer who still raises a hoe after herdsmen ruined the last harvest; the Middle Belt survivor who finds sleep again. We are stronger than the tragedies inflicted on us.
Silence, in this book, is complicity. As someone who has worked close to power, how do you live with that sentence?
Having written speeches for a governor, I know the cost of silence and of failed language. Words are like eggs: once broken they cannot be stitched perfectly back. A silent leader leaves followers guessing. A silent majority is an acquiescing majority. Democracy abhors silence. We must build a culture that can withstand robust debate.
After the prize
If you win, what changes-practically, and in how you write the next book?
When I win, my universe will be reconfigured. I will welcome the weight of victory and use the platform to work for a better Nigeria. The next book is already in the making; it will still be that book.
If you do not, what remains unfinished in Unbind Me Now that you still need to say?
I have asked God for victory. As a Christian I operate in faith. You do not pray for victory and then rehearse not winning. That would mock God.
What question do you wish interviewers would stop asking Nigerian poets-and what question do you wish they would start with?
There is no question a poet should be saved from. As witnesses to truth and repositories of the people’s wish to be heard, poets must be held to account by journalists on behalf of the people.