Editor's Pick: 6 Poetry Collections Worth Reading by Daniel Aôndona

Daniel Aôndona shares reviews of 6 poetry collections (three chapbooks and three full lengths) by notable poets such as Michael Imossan, Romeo Oriogun

6 Poetry Collections Worth Reading

Poetry, like most forms of art, offers a boundless expression of human thought and emotion, creating an evocative reveal of our bare humanity and society. For this pick, Daniel Aôndona shares reviews of 6 poetry collections (three chapbooks and three full lengths) by notable poets such as Michael Imossan, Romeo Oriogun, and Kwame Dawes.

Chapbooks

‘Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss’ by Abdulrazaq Salihu (Publisher: Sundress Publications)

Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss creatively melds science, myth, religious faith, and raw vehemence. With almost perfect evocations, it paints the silence that follows sorrow, capturing the messy, unspoken truths of regret, anger, and heartache. 

The author constantly reminds us of home, family, dreams, loved ones, and the devastation of being deprived of any of them. One of my favorite pieces in the chapbook is “The People I Cover with Empathy,” a poem that does not really have an end. Reading it, I can feel the author voicing the lines gently, as though it were a spoken word performance. It is important to say I have always been a fan of Abdulrazaq’s poetry: the musicality, the softness and beauty of the language, and how his lines melt slowly into my heart in a way that feels so physical.

‘For The Love Of Country And Memory’ by Michael Imossan (Publisher: Nigerian NewsDirect (Poetry Column-NND)

Like Samuel Adeyemi says, “When you live in a country that wants you dead, all forms of art within that country should rebel against the murderous atmosphere…” Reading Michael Imossan is to feel the body of a country: its fatigue, its fear, its unbroken resistance. These poems are bearers of the weight of hunger, violence, and memory, demanding recognition of what we might otherwise look away from. We can see that tragedy here is not just recorded; it is held, carried, understood in its full gravity.

Imossan is one poet whose work I can return to at any time. He is indeed a master of his craft; metaphors that float with ease and images so precise that a reader feels directly present with the persona. I first read For the Love of Country and Memory back in 2023, and what struck me immediately is that the book never grows old. Every time I return to it, something fresh awakens within me.

‘Burnt Men’ by Romeo Oriogun (Publisher: Praxis Magazine)

Burnt Men is a collection that burns and blesses at once. Romeo writes from the fault lines of faith, queerness, exile, and longing, yet what rises from these poems is not bitterness but a radical tenderness. The collection confronts the violence done to queer bodies and spirits, but it refuses to let cruelty have the final word.

There is something luminous in the way 

 the author handles grief, like to say sorrow itself can morph into a site of transformation. In “the origin of butterflies,” he moves from darkness toward a fragile, defiant happiness. The poem feels like a quiet manifesto: give a man words, and he will build something that can hold both light and ruin. That tension, between fire and flight, wound and wonder, is what makes this chapbook unforgettable.

What refuses to leave the reader is the work’s insistence on home. Not as a fixed place, just something shaped from the body, from love, from survival. What I genuinely love about this masterpiece is Romeo’s language. It is full of aesthetics. Tender yet unflinching, intimate yet political. These poems do not beg to be understood, they invite you in, ask you to sit with them.

Full Length 

‘Rifqa’ by Mohammed El-Kurd (Publisher: Haymarket Books)

Is Rifqa simply a collection of poems, or an act of witness? This book carries the weight of Sheikh Jarrah, of the ongoing war in Palestine, of displacement and inherited memory, but it does not agree with being reduced to representation. What moves me most is how the personal and political are inseparable here. The grandmother is not just a figure of nostalgia; she becomes archive, resistance, continuity, her life bearing the history of forced exile from Haifa and the relentless horror of ongoing dispossession. 

Mohammed El‑Kurd writes with clarity. There is no excess in his language, no performance of pain. Instead, the poems choose voice; deliberate, steady, unafraid. Lines like “Home in my memory is a green, worn‑out couch and my grandmother in every poem…” remind us that home is more than structure; it is possibility, memory, what could have been. That awareness gives the collection its emotional force.

The insistence that solidarity is both feeling and action is what remains fixed in the collection. These poems do not ask to be pitied; they demand to be faced. They challenge silence. They remind us that love, older than any state, is itself a form of resistance.

‘Nebraska’ by Kwame Dawes (Publisher: University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln)

Kwame Dawes’ Nebraska sits at the intersection of exile, faith, and the body’s silent negotiations with winter. The poems move through Midwestern geography, snow, prairie skies, barking geese, yet the speaker is never fully claimed by that terrain. Memory presses in: Accra’s red soil—the knowledge that home is not easily replaced.

What stands out to me is the honesty with which mortality is handled. Death is neither dramatized nor feared but studied, contemplated, almost befriended. In poems like “The Immigrant Contemplates Death” and “How I Became an Apostle,” suffering is seen as a site of reflection rather than spectacle. Even pain is given language precise enough to hold it without excess.

I admire the restraint of this work. It embodies its exile without screaming it. The tension between faith and doubt, belonging and estrangement, cold and revery, gives the book its steady heartbeat.

‘Deaf Republic’ by “Ilya Kaminsky (Publisher: Graywolf Press)

Deaf Republic is a masterpiece that attempts to defy categorization. It is a poignant, gut-wrenching, and breathtakingly beautiful work addressing the cruelty of a militaristic regime, displacement, love, and intimacy, and it stubbornly refuses to leave you after you’re done with its pages.

Ilya Kaminsky’s imagination is so revelatory that it leaves us suspended between deep sorrow and intense exhilaration. One thing I would like to applaud is his innovative blend of prose, poetry, and even a bit of drama. These poems read so conversationally, with accessible meanings, accompanied by sign language, perhaps real or invented for the book, which deliberately creates moments of silence while also emphasizing the “deafness.”

Some of my favorite poems in this collection include “Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins,” “Alfonso Stands Answerable,” “While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses,” and “A Bundle of Laundry.”