We’re thrilled to celebrate Nigerian poet and visual artist Abubakar Ibrahim. His manuscript, The Book of Questions, has been selected by Danusha Laméris. It is a winner of the 2025 Jacar Press Chapbook Contest.
Laméris praised the collection for “its lyricism and clear sophistication — poems that write of war and death but always include beauty. The Book of Questions is unforgettable: incantatory in rhythm, profound in feeling, reminding us that ‘life is … a well we return to, hoping / to find it full.’”
What The Hands Carry
By
Abubakar Ibrahim
Men from my village are more expressive & kind on Tuesdays. Today, I went to the market to pick a gift for my
lover.
—Abubakar Sadiq Mustapha
Candles, lipsticks, waistbeads, incense...
I picked the immaterial, too—memories of how
we traced constellations on each other's backs,
how our fingers, like birds, learned the shape
of longing. I picked the first morning we spent
by the river, dew melting into our laughter, the scent
of woodsmoke curling between us like a silent vow.
I picked the hush of midnight, where love was the
only language we spoke, where exile became
a doorway, not an absence. I picked the time we
kissed beneath a sky swollen with rain, your lips
tasting of salt & prayer, as if longing could be a
body aching to be whole. I picked the way you
trace my scars like old maps, reading them,
not with pity, but with knowing—like a cartographer
of pain, like someone who understands that
love is also a country of wounds. At the market,
I held nothing in my hands, but I walked home
carrying you, wrapped in the weight of all
I could not give, of all I already had.
Abubakar Ibrahim, popularly known by the moniker “Imam of Poets”, is a Nigerian poet and visual artist from New Bussa, a “sleepy” town in Niger State, North Central Nigeria. He holds a BSc in Biology from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. He is the co-founder of The Borgu Caravan, a youth-led, community-centric literary and educational initiative based in New Bussa, nurturing young minds in the arts and sciences in Borgu.
His work explores themes of identity, memory, displacement, and heritage. His poetry often engages with communal histories, imagination, and, at times, love, navigating the space between the personal and the historical, and often reflects on how individuals perceive themselves, how they are perceived by others, and how these dynamics shape our understanding of everyday life.
Abubakar is co-author of In the Realm of Dreams, a cross-genre collaboration with Jide Badmus, and his recent poem “The Only Elegy” was shortlisted for the 2025 Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. His poetry has appeared here in Konya Shamsrumi, in Arts Lounge, Art Muse Fair, Iman Collective, The Weganda Review, and more.
The Book of Questions will be published by Jacar Press in 2026.