Initially, poetry was just another subject in school, words strung together, one after the other. As a child, my mind was more focused on the empty cans waiting to be filled with sand or crushing biscuits into paste to bake into cake. I don’t know where the concept of time immemorial fits into the corners of my memory, but words have always lived somewhere in my heart. I just didn’t know exactly where, so I never bothered to visit.

I grew up enchanted by sound and rhymes, from my grandmother's folksongs to the English nursery rhymes I devoured.

At first, the idea of sharing it with girls in our class never came to mind; but, soon the spirit of youth began to spring in our souls, we began to hear the whispers of our hearts and our minds believed it was love.

For some reason, my then-class mistress singled me out of the kids to run her errands, having me go to the post office whenever she had a letter to post, this was often a weekly or every fourth night. These letters, I went to the post office for were the foundation of my creative writing path. I didn’t know this simple errand would be an adaptation that would follow me into adulthood and later become an integral part of my life.

The Benue Book & Arts Festival (BBAAF) is set to make its exciting debut in Nottingham on Saturday, 25th January 2025. The event, organised by the SEVHAGE Literary and Development Initiative and SEVHAGE Publishers, will take place at the Central Library in Nottingham from 10:00am to 3:30pm and promises to be a day filled with thought-provoking discussions, performances, and networking opportunities. This inaugural edition marks a significant step in SEVHAGE’s mission to create a platform for cultural exchange, celebrating literature, art, and the power of storytelling.

So when in the psych ward in 2016, words leaked out of me like pus, I did not worry about the boundary of this or that. Cows and pigeons filled the room from the fields of childhood. I let the sun be a coin, did not resist seeing the moon’s arc as a shiny scar in the night sky.

Through poetry, I was able to express the inexpressible, to give voice to the emotions that threatened to consume me. I wrote about love, loss, longing, hope and the universal human experiences that connect us all.

I’ve carried that mindset in every piece I write, I never use my phone to write. Instead  I lock myself away with my laptop that only has Microsoft word paired with a thought-racing mind. Most times before I write a good poem I’m very hungry, I probably wouldn’t have eaten the whole day. Me being uncomfortable pushes my brain to lock in, not get distracted and finish the work  so I can be comfortable again.

Since I was born, daddy bought us books. He was a writer himself, writing stories in notebooks that ended up in corners of the house, unpublished. Had my father been born in more recent times, he’d be a great writer, I think.

Although a chapbook of very short poems (which seems like the poets’ attempt to test the water of critical reception), part of the aesthetic appeal of the collection is the poets’ use of language.