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Overview
An award-winning author of numerous books, Chris Abani moves between his Igbo ancestry and migration to the United States in poems that evoke the holiness of grief through the startling, central practice of inhaling an immolated Bible.
Smoking the Bible is an arresting collection of poems thick with feeling, shaped by Chris Abani’s astounding command of form and metaphor. These poems reveal the personal story of two brothers—one elegizing the other—and the larger story of a man in exile: exile of geography, culture, and memory. What we experience in this emotionally generous collection is a deep spiritual reckoning that draws on ancient African traditions of belief, and an intellectual vivacity drawing on various wisdom literatures and traditions. Abani illustrates the connective geography between harm, regret, and release, as poems move through landscapes of Nigeria, the Midwestern United States, adulthood, and childhood. One has the sense of entering a whole and complex world of the imagination in reading this collection. There is no artifice here, no affectation; and these poems are a study in the very grace of image.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619322547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 917 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Flay
The point of a pen opens a hole
into a soul’s dereliction. This search
for the right word bores through stone.
Sunlight takes no measure of what is clung to.
That way a man can place the half-dome
of a tomato, slice into flesh
and cut an island of loss. Migrant,
punished by spice and the scent of cooking,
you wake up on a cold day in another country
and put your faith in hot rice and braised goat,
and the persistent aftertaste of a lost home.
Gospels are made of less than this.
But outside it is morning. A summer breeze
burns down to the water and the ocean begins.
Nostalgia
A train travels through an endless Midwestern cornfield,
yellow slants to gold as the sun leans heavy on the horizon;
this meager harvest of memory and hope -
the entropy of a coffee cup half spilling into
a wash of half-truths. A sweet decline.
To have spent one's life thinking, I am the good one,
the stable one, then one morning
in a city between the city you call home
and the one you are traveling to, you accept:
you are migrant. This is where you find yourself,
somewhere between coercion and insubstantial
desire, the slow decomposition that is life. Yet for now
this half-light, the gentle sway of the tracks:
music enough for this journey.
Quest
When the doctor said terminal,
you went silent, and I set off, brother. Journey
is a word trembling at a platform’s edge.
Traveling as a way of emptying out all
that cannot be emptied. Only to arrive
back at myself twice as full but with a shovel,
blade worn to nub from the digging.
There will be a reckoning, but I promise
to walk with you as far as I can
in this fragile light buoyant with loss.
Sojourn
The train bores through corn like a weevil.
Birds hop across drooping leaves like scribes.
An immigrant, I try to read origin here but cannot.
Mighty nations erased in all but place-names,
reduced to fit the small malice of a conqueror’s heart.
What will not yield to the poet’s gaze will be overwritten,
as well. Sure as ink rides the sway of paper.
But there, in a tear in the green and yellow,
a red tractor idles like a slow burning coal.
And speaking of fire, that man burning on TV,
skin melting, somewhere between Africa and Lampedusa.
Flaming in the prow of a boat.
You turn from the image, say: death will find
you how it wills, and as it wills. The chemo in you is
fire too. And in the end,
in someone’s heart, we too must burn.
Cameo: Broach
Outside, snow travels in unhurried drifts.
Inside the overheated train, fog shrouds
the dirty window, drawing mottled patterns.
A second landscape of impermanence and breath.
With a finger, I trace a cameo, not unlike
the broaches mother wore high on the neck.
You were always her favorite. The best of us.
How to broach influence? How to speak of us
without speaking of father and mother?
A swathe of light falls across the tray table,
an ant trembles under the weight of the bright.
I fold an origami bird, think of hand-rolled
cigarettes, made from Bible pages,
suddenly given flight by flame, egrets
immolated in the burn.
Question
What a short rope the larynx is,
the hanged man, sacrifice as sin.
And how many hung from trees
for redemption, for clarity, for fear?
What is this insatiable murder of trees?
In Atlanta I read under a Mamie poster.
And later a white man asked me
why there was so much violence in my novel.
And I was unsure whether he meant:
I’m sorry for all the violence we have done to you.
Outside my B&B room, an old oak where,
the white owner told me with no irony,
black bodies were hung from.
But I too stand on the path of privilege.
Why as an African haven’t I asked,
how many people my people
put on the road to enslavement?
A Small Awe
The afternoon feels like a vast distance,
a sky heavy with rain clouds.
The day is like a flicker screen
and what it illumines slips quickly to shadow.
How age diminishes childhood to a fading stain
on a table cloth; okra stew from a lunch served
by the constrained heart of a mother longing for more.
How Giacometti’s tortured bodies carry a redemption,
always alluding to the Christ on the Cross, perhaps.
Or maybe just the simple unadorned body of pain
marking a human crossing the desert of life.
Reason always ends at the edge of water –
Ocean, Lake, River, even a pond.
The world we carry inside follows us everywhere.
Our imagined home remains nostalgia; shiver,
ache, loss, and also a flutter of release.
How pigeons lift in a cloud of frenzy
then settle back to the duty of crumbs.
Ritual is Journey
And suddenly it’s raining, streaking train windows.
And light becomes a bird, a particular flutter.
What shadows let slip, tattoo patterns on skin,
repairs with needle and ink,
and the whisper of lineage.
To be a man, to be black, to be a black man,
is a dangerous journey. My heart is a knot
burling a staff, wisdom won blow by blow.
Father, I say, father.
Mercy. Come Mercy, come.
Brother, we share genes so old
England was still black, and Africa
was the only present tense in the world.
As we unzip tracks in flashes of light,
I seek an impossible dream.
Yet all rivers flow to the ocean.
All the doors white men
closed in my father's face,
cannot compare to the void,
in which my mother found no door.
Mercy. Come mercy, come.
This is no lament; women deserve our awe.
In Africa we say, he who strikes a woman strikes stone.
If women called out from all their loss
and in all their power, blood would drown everything.
And does that first black woman regret letting us live?
Still, ritual is journey, atonement is real.
As you lay dying, I asked, what is your biggest regret?
Every kindness withheld, you said.
Every flicker of pleasure denied, you said.
Look, you said, sunlight.
Table of Contents
Flay 3
Quest 4
Nostalgia 5
Birth Right 6
Sojourn 7
Excavation 8
Light Flame, Turn Rebel 9
Cameo: Broach 10
White Egret 11
Cameo: Cremation 12
Thread 13
Glow 14
Presence and Aftermath 15
Poet Desperate for Song 16
Manhood 17
Question 18
That Early Sunday 19
The Ghost Speaks 20
A Small Awe 21
Grace 22
Ritual Is Journey 24
Olokun 25
Offertory 26
Horses 27
Insomnia 28
Rain 29
How to Write a Love Letter to Your Brother 30
Allegory 31
Lineage 32
Snake 33
Litany 35
Zealot 36
Leather 37
Cameo: Afternoon Tea 39
The Bend of Tomorrow 40
Father 41
Cameo: The Cut 42
What Is Traveled, What Is Fragile 43
How to Kill Your Father 44
There Are Always Bodies in the Swamp 45
Terminus 46
Portal 47
Revelation 48
Incantation 49
Jordan Is No Mere River 50
Wing 52
Fragrance 54
Ejima 55
Scythe 56
Vigil 57
Mbubu 58
Crossing 59
The Familiar Is a Texture We Cannot Trust 60
The Calculus of Faith 61
About the Author 62