Terminal Maladies (Autumn House Press, 2024)
- Winner, 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize
- Named a Notable Book of 2024 by Open Country Magazine
- Afrocritik’s Notable Books from Africa in 2024
- Recommended Reading for Black History Month, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, 2025
In this tender debut, Nebeolisa witnesses and mourns the death of his mother from cancer, recounting how a “seed-like tumor/ [that had] been in her thigh for twenty-seven years” grew to the size of a “pumpkin”. Nebeolisa’s attention to his mother’s changing body is meticulously and compassionately observed… A robust assemblage of dreamscapes, conversations, prayers, and meditations on life and death, this collection humanely reckons with the realities of losing a parent.
— Publishers Weekly
Nebeolisa employs food and nature imagery to chart the decline in Nkoli’s health and its effect on the family. The “pear-sized/ tumor” was “mushrooming/ from the muscle” and “latching its pollen-laden arm/ to my mother’s age-wearied tendon.” After chemotherapy and radiation failed, doctors proposed surgery to “empty/ the thigh of the mass the way a child/ would scoop custard with a spoon.” … This beautiful bereavement memoir in verse gilds illness and grief with lyrical attention.
— Shelf Awareness
In this thrilling debut, Nebeolisa invites the readers to participate in the ceremony of pain. The readers should be ready to shed some tears as Nebeolisa shows the heavy weariness of living in a different continent away from your family and the impending uncertainties that surround you, even as you hear your mother’s voice sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss, and you are helpless, and you cannot leave the foreign country you are, and the only thing you can give is the money you send home for the treatment, and you know that isn’t enough.
This debut collection will ask you the difficult questions of love and distance from home in the face of impeding tragedy, and where to seek solace amidst it. More so, Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies will cut your heart, but you will ignore the bleeding and continue to read because of the delicate poetic voice of the persona. At the end of the book, you will go outside your room, and you will see the speaker’s mother among the stars, waving at you.
—Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé, Southeast Review
“Because the growl of thunder was distant,” the speaker notes in Terminal Maladies, “I completely ignored it.” The mere mention of the far-off rumbling, however, means otherwise. This thunderous collection considers the space between attention and abstraction, between life and death. Which is another way to say love.
—Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut, Terminal Maladies, introduces a poet so skillful and original that his book represents a vital moment in contemporary poetry. . . . Centering around the loss of the poet’s mother, these poems match acute observation with abiding sympathy. Masterful with formal as well as free verse, Nebeolisa moves beyond mere technique: his lines and sentences render the people he portrays with agile care. They also reveal, with often disarming immediacy, a writer capable of remaining in uncertainty and still determined to face unanticipated, often painful truths. Unsparing and yet infinitely tender, these are major poems. They will be with us for a long time to come.
—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies is an unflinching debut wrought by the power of naming, the power of image, a mother’s belief in the power of prayer. Clear-eyed but abashed, this collection insists on the necessity of memory and the inevitability of elegy. Nebeolisa’s speaker is at once vulnerable and indifferent, yet I felt undone by the speaker’s love for mother and depth of feeling for home no matter the distance.
—Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations
Terminal Maladies is a book measured in distance from mother—our first other. In these heartfelt but unerringly unsentimental poems, birth, the differentiation of self, migration, and death are plotted as points along a continuum; the emigrée’s geographic separation from his ailing mother presages the ultimate, unfordable one, just as the poet’s estrangement of syntax mirrors interior dislocations. Okwudili Nebeolisa is a poet of subtlety and surprise, in whose voice his mother’s, on the other end of the line, still reverberates.
— Jameson Fitzpatrick, author of Pricks in the Tapestry