The Gathering of Bastards

by Romeo Oriogun

Overview

Like I knew, standing
on the seashore, the hunger
wracking a migrant’s body
is movement.
—from Romeo Oriogun’s “Migrant by the Sea”

The Gathering of Bastards chronicles the movement of migrants as they navigate borders both internal and external. At the heart of these poems of vulnerability and sharp intelligence, the poet himself is the perpetual migrant embarked on forced journeys that take him across nations in West and North Africa, through Europe, and through American cities as he navigates the challenges of living through terror and loss and wrestles with the meaning of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496234032
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	10/01/2023
Series:	African Poetry Book
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	1,008,663
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Romeo Oriogun was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and now lives in Iowa. He is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (Nebraska, 2020) and Nomad.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
I. Departure
It Begins with Love
Ballet in the Cold
A Letter from the Village of Trees
Night Songs
Cotonou
The Wild Mystic
Wishbone
Ouidah
Late December in Abidjan
The World Demands from Us Our Existence
A Little Cartography of Violence
Nadoba
Crossing into Togo
The Sea Dreams of Us
Wind Whisperer
A Village Life
There Is No End Here
On the Road to Paradise
The Abandoned Church Camp
Welcome
Migrant by the Sea
The Drowned
On Leaving
At the Bus Park in Bamako
This Way to Water
Migrant at the Sahara
Someday the Desert Will Sing
Ait-Ben-Haddou
A Train Stop in the Sahara
At the Edge of the Desert
Mist
The Gallery at the End of Time
II. Remembrance
From Darkness into Light
In the Middle of August, I Saw the Sky
A Stranger in Aba
Last Days of General Abacha
Remembrance
Under the Mango Tree
Harmattan
The River Is by the Door
Falling Dusk
At Midnight I Dreamt of Rapture
Before the Arrival of Rain
The Gathering of Bastards
Waiting for Rain
At Lagos Polo Club
III. Wanderer
Assimilation
Asylee in the Evening of the World
The Migrant of Padua
O Blue Waters, O Ships!
In the Museum of Fine Arts, I Remembered Home
All Winter I Had No Love
Walking along Harvard Square
Flyway
Atlantic Beach
On Belonging
San Juan
A Man of Good Fortune
Before Nightfall
Solstice
A Phone Call from Exile
Nomad
Full Moon
Isla Verde
Lamentation
Offerings
Ode to Shadows
Echoes
The Revolution Is Over
Returnee
Salute from the Boston Cold

Editorial Reviews

Sacrament of Bodies is a very special book. But why? Because Romeo Oriogun has developed a style that is both personal and mythical, because these poems are sensual and spiritual at once, because they give us both a story and a song, a shout and a whisper. ‘I have learnt to love every broken thing,’ Oriogun tells us. I find that Oriogun’s tension between the high style of a sermon and the earthiness of love songs gives these poems a particularly memorable touch. It is memorable also because it is able to give us a journey (through time, through forgetting, through elegy, through exile) that is both a story of a real man in real time and an incantation, a speaking in tongues. But it is his music that finally sways me, it’s music that lifts it all, that makes out of truth-telling a song. The music works here because Oriogun is a master of incantation: ‘I danced,’ he tells us, ‘as if I knew every song had a door.’ Indeed. I love this beautiful, heart-wrenching, passionate book.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic


“Sacrament of Bodies is a gorgeous book filled with fiery pain and ecstatic desire. These poems are spacious enough to hold all the contradictions: the violence waged against gay people and the body’s insistence on love, the tenderness of flesh and the carnage of war, remembering and forgetting, silence and song. Romeo Oriogun has wrought complex, elegant poems that wrench beauty from all that would kill us. As he writes, ‘I worship the day because it survived the night.’ I admire these poems immensely. They make me stronger.”—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo and Like a Beggar

From the Publisher