Yet, it is not all grief and gloom as the third poem introduces the reader to sexual relations among lovers. In ‘I Consider Being Fucked by You a Form of Storytelling’, we are thrown deep into steamy, intimate conservations with a lover. Okeke displays range by depicting sex as not just an intimate performance but through the metaphorical lens of religious worship. Similar expressions of sensual desires can be found in ‘Body Language’: ‘my body flutters— a restless leaf.’ We can decode that the speaker is at peace with her longing and is unafraid to express vulnerabilities. 

Aside from the quasi-erotic undertones of Grief’s First Kiss is an Avalanche, Okeke does not hold back on painting the social issues that women encounter in modern Nigerian society. It is more intriguing how the consecutive poems ‘Yellow For My Warmth’ and ‘Bloom’ broadly highlight how the culture of silence can be a violence against oneself, until the victim decides to act. In ‘Yellow For My Warmth’, Okeke writes:  

Well, I too have learned to hold a knife between my teeth,
to kiss him deeply enough to bleed. 
I turn that blood to ink, 
make my poem immortal. 

In the lines above, Okeke aims to portray how many women stay resilient despite the unpalatable hands they are dealt in romantic relationships. This theme continues in subsequent poems, which reiterate the importance of female agency and sisterhood as necessary structures for helping women leave relationships and situations that do not serve them. Such poems, beyond exploring an interaction of plaintive motifs, present a condemnation of the patriarchal culture that is inherent in Nigerian society. But more importantly, they seem to argue, after lamenting the violences committed against one’s body, one must resolve to bloom out of the ‘many selves you bury in silence’. 

In ‘An Elegy to Friendship’, the speaker laments a friendship turned sour while also regretting how dreams have remained simply dreams. Okeke writes: 

The last time I truly saw you,
you were crying
over a boy
we swore never to speak of again. .
Before your calling,
we were seers,
holding visions of each other’s dreams
tied by the unbroken cord of friendship. 

‘Falling Forward’ is a fitting poem to close out this review, as it vehemently shows the persona on a journey of recuperation from the harrowing experiences that have left a void inside them. The poem implicitly tells us that as the world moves on and one should too:  

I say, every version of me is a stranger to the one before 
her—shapeshifting.
This body knows how to bury itself in the trenches,
to brace for the roar of an ocean that holds no god big 
enough to fill its hollow centre.
I have stood at the water’s edge, listening to its vast silence.