Yinka Olatunbosun
Femi Morgan, a Nigerian writer, publisher, media consultant, and art curator, has offered a new book to the national and international reading public. The Year of Fire is a collection of poems published by Baron’s Cafe, an imprint of Fairchild Media.
The Year of Fire explores rage and anxiety in national and cosmopolitan Nigeria spaces. The book engages the current poetic mutations where oralist, modernist styles are moulded into verses that reach the senses within and beyond the frame of Nigerian poetic tradition. The poems are bold, clear, thoughtful, visible, and tangible.
The poems on Oshodi assert a time frame for the collection. Part of the collection was curated when the writer took his observer’s brush to listen to the colours of language of the suburbs. Other poems are markers of this poetic engagement that resonate with the period of the COVID19 lockdown.
Femi Morgan has written six books of Poetry, Silent Drummings (2008), Poetry of People (eds 2015), Song of Travel (2016), Whispers (2019), Renegade (2019) The Year of Fire (2020). The Year of Fire was first published internationally within a collective of Black poets and writers. The book can be found on Amazon as well as on the Baron’s Cafe website.
All previous works have received critical reviews, have contributed to poetry subgenres, and have relatively become markers of time, landscape and age.
He is the author of six books of poetry was on the longlist for the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation Prize in 2015. He was selected for the Writivism Poetry Workshop in the same year. His book Renegade has been on the shortlist for the 2019 Pius Adesanmi Memorial Prize for Literature, selected amongst the 2019 Lagos Book and Arts Festival books, LABAF, and is currently being translated to Portuguese. Femi Morgan has also curated art and culture projects for more than ten years. He is married to a chef, they live on the edge of Lagos, Nigeria.
