Architecture of Dust [Perfect Paperback] Chike Nzerue

The poems in Chike Nzerue's Architecture of Dust lance veins on pages with dialects of grief and love, through the prism of an immigrant singing America’s gifts, the burden of its melting pot, disrupted kinships, race, and a reckoning of what it means to be a son, father, doctor, and citizen. Central to this collection is the idea of poetry as both music and vehicle to transport the reader from the streets of Nashville to London, to the lights of Las Vegas, skirting the nebulous notion of home, as the poems sweep from the edge of the Mojave Desert to Kano, Nigeria, at the fringe of the Sahara Desert. Although these worlds seem disparate, the poems reveal these worlds beautifully as one. The poems provide an unflinching portrait of colonial violence, cultural and family disruptions, love, racism, and loss, while making innovative leaps of faith with metaphor and language. The poems may seem immediate and contemporary, but still harken to tradition, lyrical insights, and narrative sweeps to shore up the reader’s heart. The poems are an apophatic invitation and invocation of our unspoken common humanity.

Chike Nzerue’s poetry and essays have appeared in the Henderson, Nevada, Writer’s Bloc 10 anthology, CHEST medical journal, American Journal of Kidney Diseases, and Voices of the Grieving Heart, an anthology of poems about hope, healing, and loss from the COVID pandemic, among others. He is a graduate of Oxford University, and a former professor and clinical dean at Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee. He was born in Kano, Nigeria, and is a practicing nephrologist in Las Vegas, Nevada.