Facing You
City Lights Spotlight No. 19
From acclaimed Nigeria-born, Brooklyn-based poet Uche Nduka, a book of love poems written with compact elegance and vivid eroticism. "The real in Nduka's work carries the resonance not only of his Nigerian identity and experience of political violence but also the dislocation of the emigre and the frightening power relations of intimacy as mapped onto the lyric."-Joyelle McSweeney, Boston Review Facing You is a collection of love lyrics, as well as an exploration of what goes into making the public and private self, from acclaimed Nigerian American poet Uche Nduka. Passionate and erotic, Facing You nonetheless resists being hermetically sealed within the relationship, and is subject to the intrusions of "the dubious world": war, exile, protest, and police violence intrude but cannot defeat Nduka's expressions of desire, where reality and surreality are one. "These poems were written openly and freely about my vision and experience," he writes, "crossing the wires of sex and prophecy."
Uche Nduka is an itinerant poet and professor presently living in Brooklyn. He was born in Nigeria, was raised bilingual in Igbo and English, and earned his BA from the University of Nigeria. He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. In 2007, he immigrated to the United States, where he would earn his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn. Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including the U.S.-published books Living in Public (2018), Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007). His work has been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian.
