“Though there is ordinarily no language for pain,” Elaine Scarry writes in the introduction of The Body in Pain, “under the pressure of the desire to eliminate pain, an at least fragmentary means of verbalization is available both to those who are themselves in pain and to those who wish to speak on behalf of others”. So under pressure—within pain—the unsayable allows itself to be said. The poems in Othuke Umukoro’s debut collection, Fenestration (Texas Review Press, 2025), read as a product of this pressure, shying away from neither suffering nor joy.
Can a poet write themselves out of or into anything—memory, history, relation, loss, pleasure, extinction? For Umukoro, language serves as the sometimes cruel, often failing, always fervent ship through which landscapes of historic brutality, intimate devastation, and daily miracle are discovered. A collection of poems like this, holding together reflections of the dehumanizing suffering inflicted at Elmina Castle—one of the most important posts in the transatlantic slave trade—and the diligence demonstrated by six squirrels on a winter day in Iowa City, is no easy undertaking, and Umukoro is keenly aware. Yet he writes on, writes still. The astonishing astuteness of his observations and the clarity of internal thoughts stitch together this remarkable debut.
When art investigates the darkest folds of history, the artist must balance their allegiance to the truth and severity of the source material with their responsibility to and allyship with their audience. Writing about humanity’s capacity for cruelty is not new, but its difficulty endures for even the most experienced authors. I am blown away by how intuitively and genuinely Umukoro demonstrates care for all spheres of humankind. Here, human history is equal parts brutal, strange, and blessed; poems recounting the murders of enslaved children are housed alongside poems overhearing post-sex vegan meatball conversations. These poems knocked the breath out of me with their humor, wit, earnestness, heartbreak, longing, and confrontation of uncertainty. Repeatedly, I found myself clutching my chest in devastation, and then in laughter and surprise.
The collection begins with Mass, a poem in which I feel the speaker’s soul splitting again and again, and barely healing in between. “I am the last to enter”, the speaker says when describing the female slave dungeons at a tour of Elmina Castle; even the start of this collection is final. There are no words in these poems that are ignorant of their consequences. The last line, “Whichever way I look, I am what is bent,” is a beautiful and haunting declaration that speaks to the hard work of creating and preserving these poems, which is threaded throughout the collection. In Passage, Umukoro asks “Can you build a grieving / centre inside a poem?”, and in The Year After the Year After the Year My Father Died, a wonderful title that grieves already in isolation, a direct description of poetic labor closes the piece: “On the white / porch I take the poem / apart again”. For Umukoro, grieving is work—there is no way around it—but it is work worth doing. The work demands descriptions of children who are “sold & resold under a different sky”. The work demands attention for the endless and senseless dungeons, manacles, bones, and deaths. I find this line extraordinarily true of the requests these poems place upon their readers: “What splinters / inside me splinters / inside me because it splinters.”
Miraculously, and wondrously, Umukoro treats curiosity and delight with the same diligence and care as he does historical and personal anguish. While working as a cleaner in a motel, the speaker inquires in exasperation, “For Pete’s sake, who honks like penguins / when they’re fucking?”, which led me to search online for penguin honking audio—and I feel confident in saying I would have had a similar question if in the speaker’s position. In the middle of the quietly sorrowful poem Passing, I found the description of “rabbits… built like 40-year-old toddlers” enchanting and endearing. The humor and lightness are undeniably present, yet natural. At no point in these poems did I feel that my attention was being forced away from the conceptual heart of this project out of discomfort or exhaustion. Rather, the joy was unpredictable and unavoidable, similar to how most of us encounter it in our own lives.
I want to mention Umukoro’s compelling treatment of time throughout Fenestration. Many of the poems provide information about the season or scenery, but the primary measurement of time remains relative. The titles of three poems use the phrase, “the year my father died”; details of landscape emerge repeatedly as markers of a passage through history or memory. “Everything is in bloom”, begins The Year My Father Died. At the end: “The fungus green / of this month, my father, how could it mean go?” The natural world—which this poet engages intimately with in poems like Delisted, dealing with loss as related to wildlife and the environment—cannot be separated from pivotal moments in the speaker’s life, which cannot be separated from the sensations of mourning and longing. This mode of measurement carries the timelessness of oral traditions; standard units of measurement mean nothing if they are not translated into sentiment. Although the speaker often places poems with great specificity—whether it is within a particular month, or a year before or after the pandemic—time only holds weight in this collection when marked in relation to an occasion of the heart.
I have been a fan of Umukoro’s work for years now. I first met him on a humid, destabilizing summer day in Iowa City. Although I would argue that Iowa City just happens to be one of those places where most people feel displaced—as if plucked off the ground by a personal tornado and set down—I have never witnessed Umukoro in a landscape which is clearly his, where he clearly belongs. He is always two degrees removed from familiarity, and I suspect this is part of his perceptive verse—his eyes are open when most of ours are mid-blink, his heart beats faster and more fervently when most of ours have slowed to rest. To reference his poem The Year Before the Year Before the Year Before the Year My Father Died, I truly believe that “somewhere / between the darkest / hour & / the darkest hour” is this poet’s voice and its nuanced light, shadow, and humor. This is a writer who takes meticulous care of his subject matter as well as his audience. Umukoro’s words are earnest and courageous, yet not without fear in the face of the unknown. How truthful—and what a gift in our current period of atmospheric doubt. Fenestration by Othuke Umukoro, the winner of the 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize selected by Diane Seuss, is out now with Texas Review Press.
