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    Smoking the Bible
    Smoking the Bible
    Smoking the Bible
    Ebook86 pages58 minutes

    Smoking the Bible

    By Chris Abani

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    About this ebook

    An award-winning author of numerous books, Chris Abani moves between his Igbo ancestry and migration to the United States in poems that evoke the holiness of grief through the startling, central practice of inhaling an immolated Bible.

    Smoking the Bible is an arresting collection of poems thick with feeling, shaped by Chris Abani’s astounding command of form and metaphor. These poems reveal the personal story of two brothers—one elegizing the other—and the larger story of a man in exile: exile of geography, culture, and memory. What we experience in this emotionally generous collection is a deep spiritual reckoning that draws on ancient African traditions of belief, and an intellectual vivacity drawing on various wisdom literatures and traditions. Abani illustrates the connective geography between harm, regret, and release, as poems move through landscapes of Nigeria, the Midwestern United States, adulthood, and childhood. One has the sense of entering a whole and complex world of the imagination in reading this collection. There is no artifice here, no affectation; and these poems are a study in the very grace of image.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateMay 17, 2022
    ISBN9781619322547
    Smoking the Bible
    Author

    Chris Abani

    Chris Abani is a Nigerian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. His publications include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames and Graceland. He is Professor of English at Northwestern University, and the recipient of many prizes, including the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the PEN Hemingway Prize.

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      Book preview

      Smoking the Bible - Chris Abani

      FLAY

      The point of a pen opens a hole

      into a soul’s dereliction. This search

      for the right word bores through stone.

      Sunlight takes no measure of what is clung to.

      A man can place the half-dome

      of a tomato, slice into flesh,

      and cut an island of loss. Migrant,

      punished by spice and the scent of cooking,

      you wake up on a cold day in another country

      and put your faith in hot rice and braised goat,

      and the persistent aftertaste of a lost home.

      Gospels are made of less than this.

      But outside it is morning. A summer breeze

      burns down to the water and the ocean begins.

      QUEST

      When the doctor said Terminal,

      you went silent, and I set off, Brother. Journey

      is a word trembling at a platform’s edge.

      Traveling as a way of emptying out all

      that cannot be emptied.

      Only to arrive back

      at myself twice as full but with a shovel, blade

      worn to nub from the digging. There

      will be a reckoning, but I promise

      to walk with you as far as I can

      in this fragile light buoyant with loss.

      NOSTALGIA

      A train travels through a Midwestern cornfield,

      yellow slants to gold as the sun leans heavy on the horizon;

      this meager harvest of memory and hope—

      the entropy of a coffee cup half spilling into

      a wash of half-truths. A sweet decline.

      To have spent your life thinking, I am

      the good one, the stable one, then one

      morning in a city between the city you call

      home and the one you are traveling to, you

      accept: you are migrant. This is where you

      find yourself, somewhere between coercion

      and insubstantial desire, the slow decomposition that is

      life. Yet for now this half-light, the gentle

      sway on the tracks, music enough for this journey.

      BIRTH RIGHT

      Thin pages brittle with words and

      two brothers, one elder. The biblical,

      unavoidable here. And there is the rub.

      To come to self, to skin, is to rip away another, separate,

      tear. Train snaking track, snaking thoughts—

      window as page, margin as frame, what is kept within,

      what slips away. From beyond the willow’s lazy bow

      into river, beyond the crane stabbing for minnows

      in the shallows, beyond the reflected sunlight,

      in a cathedral the tints of stained glass,

      that addendum to light

      that tempers it to grace.

      SOJOURN

      The train bores through corn like a weevil.

      Birds hop across drooping leaves like scribes.

      An immigrant, I try to read origin here but cannot.

      Mighty nations erased in all but place-names,

      reduced to fit the small malice of a conqueror’s heart.

      What will not yield to the poet’s gaze will be overwritten.

      Sure as ink rides the sway of paper.

      But there, in a tear in the green and yellow,

      a red tractor idles like a slow-burning coal.

      Fire, that man burning on TV,

      skin melting, somewhere between Africa and

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