ex nihilo

by Adebe D. A.

Reviews

Ex Nihilo is a bold, beautiful, and timely collection of poetry. Deeply imbued with a rhythm as deep as Langston’s rivers, Adebe D.A. choreographs her words to dance on and off the page — her canvas. A remarkable remix of language and history, Ex Nihilo moves us to places we have not yet considered. A call to both thought and action, Adebe confronts and celebrates her polychromatism. She is a major voice of a new generation.

—M.K. Asante, Jr.

At once bristling and lyrical, intimate and political, Adebe’s persona in this courageous debut collection of poems vacillates between seemingly irreconcilable poses: artist and academic, activist and sensualist, innovator and traditionalist. As she confesses in the poem “Colour Lessons”, she’d like to be everything. Herein the reader will discover the richness of mixed legacies, competing voices, and the joys and burdens that come with them.

— Priscila Uppal

The poems delight in the play of line against idea in a vexed terrain of politics and feeling; history and the contemporary search here for new images. A poet of great promise.

—Leslie Sanders

Ex Nihilo troubles the waters of identity, opens the borders of literary precedence and official “canon” and is straight from the hip. It is fierce, streetwise poetry, with “a beauty of incongruence.”

—Anne Waldman

These lyrics dare to “bring da noise” – not only the funk and blues of race snafus, but also the exquisite soul sound of intellectual analysis, harmonizing rhythmic lines and gritty insights. They come from a woman who knows the intricate gradations connecting black skin to white, pop culture to academia, and links sophisticated analysis with the verve and drive of performance poetry.

—Dektet Jury