Winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s “The Origin of Wounds” exhumes fragments of historical accounts that bring us face-to-face with the brutality of national and global wars. Malik’s pivotal poems address personal and global grief through the loss of homeland, the loss of beloveds, and the continuous search for a sanctuary. He presents to us diverse ways we can engage moments steeped in unrest and conflict, while weaving poems that honor both the living and dead. In poems that startle and astonish, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan shows unflinchingly the excruciating lives of children in war-torn homelands, while also guiding us through diaries of war notes and archives of forgotten wounds. Through the poems in “The Origin of Wounds,” Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s remarkable visions as a poet brighten across the pages as he reflects on the past, the present, and the future. He renders powerfully the experiences of the displaced, the migrants on boats leaving homeland to an imagined promised land. He examines the wounds of displacement, the wounds of migrants, of ancestors on slave ships and dreams buried in the dark of war. Malik reminds us through his poems that we must pay attention to the wounds carried from the past to the present, and we must also do everything possible to save the children from a world fraught with monumental tragedies.
BLURBS
“Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Origin of Wounds is a haunting dirge for loss, where “natives weigh their dreams / on the scale of war.” Though rooted in Nigeria, the poems resonate globally, from the Middle East and South America to the United States and its mass shootings. Malik is a lucid truthsayer of our time, and his poems are prayers of remembrance, in which “the hand of history / still reaches from the dark room of forgetfulness.” Each line, each poem, stands witness, building a mourning procession that leads the reader toward praise—praise of “the ancestors for carrying us through / the storm of the world.”
–Kaveh Bassiri, Judge for 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize
“Through a voice both elegiac and liturgical, the poems in Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s powerful debut, The Origin of Wounds transform burial into sacrament. And weaving a history of slavery, diaspora, impoverishment, and victimization, from the Middle Passage to the current tragic migrant flow through the Mediterranean, the drowned are not forgotten, but are elevated into subjects of sacred lament, their loss archived in “the diary of water.”
–Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas
Winner of Academy of American Poets Fellowship prize
Sorrow here resounds prophetically and becomes a communal act braided with profound ancestral wisdom. This is a searing and redemptive book that I will return to for its fierce compassion and lyrical devotion.”
–Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas
Winner of a MacArthur Fellowship
“A heartbreaking lyric debut, The Origin of Wounds shows us how to look at the broken world without blinking, while urging us to praise it in its sorrow, as well as in “the fragile arms of hope.” –Danusha Laméris, author of Blade by Blade
2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz Country, California
“Long practice has made Malik a master of the dirge as a genre. His delivery seems almost effortless but then we also know that there is really no such thing as effortlessness in any genre. Before we get halfway in the collection, we realize that we are watching and listening to a master at work.”
–Tade Ipadeola, author of The Sahara Testaments
Winner, 2013 NLNG Prize
“This collection is a triumph of feeling and form. It is also a triumph of control in a genre of poetry in which it is easiest to go overboard. Malik’s final gift to the wounded is the dignity he offers in the face of gargantuan suffering. To hear the lament raised without stridency, the names of the departed as the angels would pronounce them, is a gift not of this world.”
–Tade Ipadeola, author of The Sahara Testaments
2009 Delphic Laurel in Poetry
Get a copy