Living in Public, a book of poems by Uche Nduka
Kristiania is proud to announce the publication of Uche Nduka’s collection of poems Living in Public.
In Nduka’s Living in Public, the spheres of daily living, history, politics and love are not separated. In this book the sensual is sacred. The poetry is both understated and confrontational. Complacency is anathema to this long poem that passionately unfolds in an exploratory stylistic ambience. Living in Public riffs on aesthetic and erotic sprightliness. This volume of poetry centers anger, joy and visionary intensity.
Buy Living in Public by Uche Nduka from Small Press Distribution.
“Writing on several fronts at once”, eros and polemos inter alia, Living In Public comprises magnificently vivid outrage, word as stab, writing as scarification, blazes of truth, sparks of friendship. Language rules as a “blowtorch in the clutter” of contemporary debacular US life, particularly for someone with a doubled, even tripled perspective. Music like “vellum, zelig, bunking in an aisle” jostles and bristles against itself. And yet a sublime hospitality pervades even this burn-it-to-the-ground, virtuosic energy, fierce in its conviction that “love’s circumference/remains inviolable”.
— Maria Damon (Editor of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader)
At the heart of Uche Nduka’s wondrous long poem Living In Public is a deep attentiveness to what Robert Creeley called “the radical presence of person”, uncovered and lived with, all of its needs and intimacies and measures of wisdom articulated with astonishing care. Nduka’s expansive range of feeling is drawn across the wry particulars of love’s humor, a lived sense of consciousness both civic and worldly, and a multi-faceted feel for material and sound. The structure of the book as a sequence of short poems is subtle and elegant, allowing Nduka’s visual sensibility to, by turns, unfold gradually, cut sharply, come forward, and slide further back into the plane as needed. Amidst the seemingly endless protean array of doom-forces fed to us moment by moment, Living In Public’s commitment to human complexity and shapeliness is a restorative, powerful gift.
— Anselm Berrigan (Author of Something For Everyone)
“…The People/in this poem talk all/the time…” and all at the same time through small fissures from the underground, a harmonic revolutionary call toward listening. In Living In Public, Uche Nduka has written a suite of 168 songs sung by a choir of one. Each is an act of resistance to the banal, the corporate, the mediation clamor, each murmurs thundering praise for the explosive healing power of love.
— Rachel Levitsky (Author of The Story of My Accident Is Ours)
Read Nduka’s bio.
