Inua Ellams: The Actual

About

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright and performer, a Complete Works poet alumni and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Across his work, identity, displacement and destiny are recurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new; traditional African storytelling with contemporary poetry.

Inua's latest collection, The Actual, is a symphony of personal and political fury – sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy. In 55 poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity.

Written on his phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry a polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and 'foolish machismo' of hero culture – from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram.

Through the thick gauze of history, these breathtaking poems look the world square in the face and ask, "what the actual—-?"