Smoking the Bible
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.
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Smoking the Bible
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.
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Smoking the Bible

Smoking the Bible

by Chris Abani
Smoking the Bible

Smoking the Bible

by Chris Abani

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781556596285
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication date: 05/17/2022
Pages: 96
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Acclaimed novelist, poet, and public speaker Chris Abani grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria. Author of fourteen books, he is the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship, among many honors. Abani is a Board of Trustees Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.

Read an Excerpt

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.

That way 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.


Nostalgia

A train travels through an endless 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 one's 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 of the tracks:
music enough for this journey.


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.


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,

as well. 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.
And speaking of fire, that man burning on TV,

skin melting, somewhere between Africa and Lampedusa.
Flaming in the prow of a boat.

You turn from the image, say: death will find you how it wills, and as it wills. The chemo in you is

fire too. And in the end,
in someone’s heart, we too must burn.


Cameo: Broach

Outside, snow travels in unhurried drifts.
Inside the overheated train, fog shrouds the dirty window, drawing mottled patterns.
A second landscape of impermanence and breath.
With a finger, I trace a cameo, not unlike the broaches mother wore high on the neck.
You were always her favorite. The best of us.
How to broach influence? How to speak of us without speaking of father and mother?
A swathe of light falls across the tray table,
an ant trembles under the weight of the bright.
I fold an origami bird, think of hand-rolled cigarettes, made from Bible pages,
suddenly given flight by flame, egrets immolated in the burn.


Question

What a short rope the larynx is,
the hanged man, sacrifice as sin.
And how many hung from trees for redemption, for clarity, for fear?
What is this insatiable murder of trees?

In Atlanta I read under a Mamie poster.
And later a white man asked me why there was so much violence in my novel.
And I was unsure whether he meant:
I’m sorry for all the violence we have done to you.

Outside my B&B room, an old oak where,
the white owner told me with no irony,
black bodies were hung from.
But I too stand on the path of privilege.
Why as an African haven’t I asked,
how many people my people put on the road to enslavement?


A Small Awe

The afternoon feels like a vast distance,
a sky heavy with rain clouds.
The day is like a flicker screen and what it illumines slips quickly to shadow.
How age diminishes childhood to a fading stain on a table cloth; okra stew from a lunch served by the constrained heart of a mother longing for more.
How Giacometti’s tortured bodies carry a redemption,
always alluding to the Christ on the Cross, perhaps.
Or maybe just the simple unadorned body of pain marking a human crossing the desert of life.
Reason always ends at the edge of water –
Ocean, Lake, River, even a pond.
The world we carry inside follows us everywhere.
Our imagined home remains nostalgia; shiver,
ache, loss, and also a flutter of release.
How pigeons lift in a cloud of frenzy then settle back to the duty of crumbs.


Ritual is Journey

And suddenly it’s raining, streaking train windows.
And light becomes a bird, a particular flutter.
What shadows let slip, tattoo patterns on skin,
repairs with needle and ink,
and the whisper of lineage.
To be a man, to be black, to be a black man,
is a dangerous journey. My heart is a knot burling a staff, wisdom won blow by blow.
Father, I say, father.
Mercy. Come Mercy, come.
Brother, we share genes so old
England was still black, and Africa was the only present tense in the world.
As we unzip tracks in flashes of light,
I seek an impossible dream.
Yet all rivers flow to the ocean.
All the doors white men closed in my father's face,
cannot compare to the void,
in which my mother found no door.
Mercy. Come mercy, come.
This is no lament; women deserve our awe.
In Africa we say, he who strikes a woman strikes stone.
If women called out from all their loss and in all their power, blood would drown everything.
And does that first black woman regret letting us live?
Still, ritual is journey, atonement is real.
As you lay dying, I asked, what is your biggest regret?
Every kindness withheld, you said.
Every flicker of pleasure denied, you said.
Look, you said, sunlight.

Table of Contents

Flay 3

Quest 4

Nostalgia 5

Birth Right 6

Sojourn 7

Excavation 8

Light Flame, Turn Rebel 9

Cameo: Broach 10

White Egret 11

Cameo: Cremation 12

Thread 13

Glow 14

Presence and Aftermath 15

Poet Desperate for Song 16

Manhood 17

Question 18

That Early Sunday 19

The Ghost Speaks 20

A Small Awe 21

Grace 22

Ritual Is Journey 24

Olokun 25

Offertory 26

Horses 27

Insomnia 28

Rain 29

How to Write a Love Letter to Your Brother 30

Allegory 31

Lineage 32

Snake 33

Litany 35

Zealot 36

Leather 37

Cameo: Afternoon Tea 39

The Bend of Tomorrow 40

Father 41

Cameo: The Cut 42

What Is Traveled, What Is Fragile 43

How to Kill Your Father 44

There Are Always Bodies in the Swamp 45

Terminus 46

Portal 47

Revelation 48

Incantation 49

Jordan Is No Mere River 50

Wing 52

Fragrance 54

Ejima 55

Scythe 56

Vigil 57

Mbubu 58

Crossing 59

The Familiar Is a Texture We Cannot Trust 60

The Calculus of Faith 61

About the Author 62

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