Abby Kesington: Writing At The Edge of Light

By Ugo Aliogo

On a quiet evening in Houston, the air heavy with the warmth of spring, Abby Kesington stepped onto the small stage of the Silos art space. The lights were low, the audience intimate, their conversations softened into expectancy. She carried no fanfare with her, only a book in hand, the air of someone who belonged more to her words than to her surroundings. When she began to read from her poem Finish Line, her voice was not loud or theatrical. It was measured, a steady stream that carried listeners into the centre of her private storms.

“Life storms like a feline,” she read, pausing just long enough for the image to linger, “but remember, the sun still shines.”

The space fell into a hush. It was not the hush of polite attention, but more of recognition. Here was a poet speaking from a place many had been but few had named. It was the sound of language making room for silence, a reminder that despair, no matter how encompassing, was never final.

Born in Nigeria, in a household where current affairs were not just consumed but debated, where the weight of current events pressed daily. Her early life set her on a course of journalism. She became a reporter for Daily Independent and later for Tell magazine in Lagos. There she covered labour relations and politics, the relentless beat of national issues, and the struggles of a young democracy.

Journalism sharpened her pen. It trained her to listen closely, to render reality in clean lines, to write with urgency. Yet something in that work left her restless. The stories were urgent, but the silences beneath them often felt louder. There were truths that could not fit into headlines, griefs that demanded more than a column inch.

It was in Houston, far from the frenetic pace of Lagos, that poetry found her. She has often said it came in a season of darkness. “I was drowning in despair,” she recalls, “and poetry became my lifeline. It was not something I chose. It chose me.”

Her debut collection, Finish Line: A Book of Poems, bears the marks of that turning point. The poems are not elaborate with formality. They are stripped down, direct, often conversational. They speak of anxiety, of nights that stretch too long, of minds that cannot quiet. Yet threaded through each piece is the search for peace, the stubborn refusal to accept despair as the final word.

In “Counting to Ten,” she writes of breath as both ritual and rebellion, a way of reclaiming presence in the midst of panic. In “They Made a Promise,” she examines betrayal, not only in personal terms but as a broader reflection on trust broken by systems and institutions.

The title poem, Finish Line, is not about endings but about survival. It is about reaching the point where giving up seems easier, then pressing forward anyway. “The finish line is not where life stops,” Kesington says. “It is where you take stock, gather strength, and decide to keep going.”

Her work is deeply personal, but it never remains private. Again and again, the poems spill outward into the world. She writes about freedom, about women’s rights, about the earth in peril, about poverty and injustice. For Kesington, the inner life and the global are one fabric. The storms inside mirror the storms outside.

Though she began as a writer who preferred the page, Kesington has become increasingly drawn to performance. Houston’s literary community has embraced her, and she has found herself reading to audiences who bring her words into new resonance.

At the Color: Story 2023 exhibition, she shared the stage with visual artists and storytellers. The space was alive with color, with canvases blazing and sculptures towering. Into that sensory field, her poems entered like whispers. Yet they carried weight. “Poetry does not compete with art,” she says. “It completes it. It gives voice to what the eyes see but the mouth cannot say.”

For those who have heard her, it is clear that her work belongs both on the page and in the air. She has said that she resisted performance at first, fearing the exposure it demanded. But audiences have given her something she did not expect. “They gave me back my own words with their silence, their nods, their tears,” she explains. “I realised poetry was not only for me. It was for us.”

Kesington does not write with the present moment alone in mind. She writes with legacy in view. “I want my poetry to endure for generations,” she says. “To speak to people long after I am gone. That is my greatest hope.”

Her influences reflect that desire. She names Wole Soyinka, Maya Angelou, and Pablo Neruda as touchstones. From Soyinka she has inherited a sense of poetry as rooted in cultural and political memory. From Angelou she has learned resilience, the insistence that voice can be both personal and universal. From Neruda she has absorbed the belief that poetry can hold both sensuality and protest, both tenderness and fire.

Yet she does not mimic them. She distills their lessons into her own sound. Her poems do not thunder like Soyinka’s or sing with Angelou’s cadences. They whisper and insist at once, carrying vulnerability as a kind of strength.

In her work, certain themes return again and again. Anxiety is one. Freedom is another. She writes of climate change, of women navigating patriarchal constraints, of children robbed of innocence by poverty. She does not treat these themes as distant abstractions. They are embodied, humanized, lived.

In one poem she describes the earth as a body gasping for air, lungs collapsing under the weight of neglect. In another she gives voice to a woman whose silence has been mistaken for weakness, reminding the reader that silence itself can be strategy, that strength often hides in quiet persistence.

Her writing does not offer easy resolutions. Instead, it names what is often unnamed. It lingers in the tension between despair and hope, between fear and resilience. “Poetry,” she says, “is not about answers. It is about finding the courage to sit with the questions.”

She has been published in The Bayou Review and in collections by the Pan African Writers Association, including A Legacy of Freedom. Her poems appear on Poetry.com, where she engages with a global audience. In Houston, she is active in Writespace, a community for writers that nurtures creativity and connection.

Through these spaces, her words travel further than she imagined when she first began writing in solitude. Readers from Lagos to London to Houston find pieces of themselves in her lines. “That is the miracle of poetry,” she says. “It leaves your desk and becomes someone else’s companion in the night.”

When asked what lies ahead, Kesington does not speak in terms of career milestones or literary prizes. She speaks instead of persistence. “I want to keep writing, to keep giving voice to the things that trouble us and the things that lift us,” she says. “If my words can offer even a small light to someone, then I have done my work.”

Her next projects continue to explore the balance between personal struggle and collective reality. She is interested in poetry as protest, as environmental witness, as testimony for the marginalised. Yet she insists she will always write from her own center first. “The personal is never separate from the universal,” she says. “What I feel, others have felt. What I name, others are waiting to name.”

To sit with Kesington is to sit with someone who has made peace with contradiction. She is quiet but insistent, vulnerable but firm, rooted in her Nigerian past yet blossoming in her American present. She carries the discipline of journalism and the freedom of poetry. She writes of despair but offers hope.

In her own words, “Poetry is where I breathe freely. It is where I can be both broken and whole.”

For those who encounter her work, that breath is contagious. It offers permission to pause, to feel, to remember that even when life storms like a feline, the sun still shines.

And perhaps that is the true finish line. Not the end of the race, but the recognition that in each step forward, in each poem written and read, life continues, light persists, and words endure.