Peter Midgley – författare

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiqueing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with western poetics. The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two pulished collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley’s introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of diaspora and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an afterword written by the poet with Chris Dunton.

In the polyglot world of Eaten by White Ants, poet Peter Midgley explores the ways in which language can hide, obscure, and falsify pasts and heritages. He engages with what it means to learn, unlearn, and relearn language, and grapples with his own implication in the erasures caused by what has been eaten, literally and metaphorically, by greedy white ants. Midgley’s poems reflect a deep concern with human rights and equity and meditate on the multiple legacies of a complex, colonial past. Form-defying yet accessible, Eaten by White Ants will find a home on the shelves of North American, European, and African poetry readers, as well as readers drawn to a mix of experimental poetry and more conventional lyric.