Your Crib, My Qibla

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.

"A heartbreaking book of poems, Your Crib, My Qibla journeys through a father's grief after the loss of his beloved daughter. It takes admirable courage and striking language to seek solace after experiencing the unimaginable."-Rigoberto GonzÁlez, Oprah Daily "Your Crib, My Qibla is perfect for someone who needs to be held in the body until the 'mind feels like a mind.'"-Amanda Auerbach, Kenyon Review "Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla will join a list of collections by some of the most notable new African voices in the continent and in the diaspora, whose books have been published by the University of Nebraska Press."-Ernest O. Ogunyemi, Open Country “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 “‘Where your headstone was, I put a mirror, / each time I come to visit / I see that you live in my face,’ writes Saddiq Dzukogi in this heartbreaking, powerful collection of poems. A love song, an elegy, a book-long sequence, Your Crib, My Qibla is a parent’s epistles to a deceased child, an exploration of pain that continues to sing through pain (‘your songs endure // inside his bones. / They will nourish the loneliness- / yours and his.’). The mourning here is endless and yet transformative (‘Today Baha is not dead; she is six years old, / forcing marshmallows into his mouth. / Says I’m grown enough to feed you, Abba, / with the future’). Impossible not to be moved by this voice of a father who sees a dead child’s face everywhere (‘He presses a deep kiss on your grave, / on your forehead’), by this need to pull the dead out of the ground. This is a stunning, memorable book.”-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa “Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla signals the arrival of a poet of assured craft, of courageous sentiment, and one who possesses a capacious facility with language and musicality. In this collection Dzukogi offers an elegy to innocence and to the false security of the living, and yet he demonstrates that the art of lamentation is as forceful an expression of hope as we have available to us. This is a remarkable introduction to a poet for our moment and time.”-Kwame Dawes author of Nebraska: Poems

• Acknowledgments    I. Your CribWineglass    Song to a Birdwoman    Internment    Burial Sheet    So Much Memory    Scarf    The Fruit Tree    A Nimble Darkness    He Didn’t Get to Say Goodbye    The House Held by Chaos    Marshmallow    Enigma    Palms    Shoes    Measurable Weight    The Gown    This Web    Shattered    A Kind of Burden    Learning about Constellations    Elegy    Quenching    Back to Life    Ba Shi, Ba Shi    The Conceit of Shadows    Strain    Window    Is Memory in Her Brother’s Body?     Dates    Ribbons    Revival    Cave    Sufficient    Chibi    Shahada    Seismic    The Breadth of a Butterfly    Flower’s Tenderness    Memories by the Sea    When He Says Your Name    A Song in the Mouth of a Ghost    Half-Light    What Belongs to Him    Aubade    II. My Qibla-A DialogueShe Begins to Speak    Journey Home    Still-Life    Janazah    Observations    Measuring the Length of Grief by the Length of a River    Ummi    Unexpressed Grief    My Son Asks if I Miss My Daughter    At Your Grave I’m Reminded of the Day You Were Born    Where Pain Lives    December    Inner Songs    Waterlog    One Year After    Notes