#Pre-Order: Your Crib, My Qibla by Saddiq Dzukogi

Your Crib, My Qibla, the poetry collection of Nigerian poet and PhD student at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, Saddiq Dzukogi, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in March, 2021

In a poem from the collection, Measuring the Length of Grief by the Length of a River, which appears in the Issue 13 of Grist Journal, Saddiq writes:

Child, my mother says your body shortens 
the distance between God and I— a bridge   
sprawled from my doorstep into paradise.

Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father’s pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living.

Culminating in an imagined dialogue between the father and his deceased daughter in the intricate space of the family, Your Crib, My Qibla explores grief, the fleeting nature of healing, and the constant obsession of memory as a language to reach the dead.

Praise for Your Crib, My Qibla:

“In Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla the loss of his daughter becomes the navigational pull to an interiority steeped in earthly grief and a desire for the unseen spaces of the afterlife. With incredible fidelity Dzukogi unravels a series of poems that wrestle with his loss and make meaning of our most unbearable moments. His is a song of embodied witness and recollection shaped by a voice skilled in the musicality of duality. These are poems that find their way to the reader’s depth and open a window to the otherworld.”—Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite

Enter here to pre-order your copies.

About the Author:

Saddiq Dzukogi holds a degree in mass communication from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria), and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A 2017 finalist of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Dzukogi’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, African American Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere.


SAI Sabouke
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Sai Sabouke is a writer living in New Bussa, Nigeria. He’s a dervish who sees Sufism, history and language as formidable tools for society regeneration. His writing has appeared in Praxis Magazine Online and Agbowo. Sabouke loves beans, coffee and dreams of roasting the entrails of vultures.