BAINBRIDGE ISLAND NOTEBOOK
by Uche Nduka
How do you make a home at the end of the world? Sheltering with his wife and daughter on Washington State's scenic and teeming Bainbridge Island during a global pandemic, the poet as anarchic political surrealist considers problems of isolation, communication, and connection in the most personal terms. Using his unique brand of explosive abstraction, he carves out a space to explore the meaning of dwelling, family, health, love, and diaspora.
Uche Nduka utilizes his experimental style in newly urgent and intimate thematic directions, exploring unfamiliar archipelagos of pleasure and belonging. He evokes the foggy vistas of the Pacific Northwest in a manner one might consider diaristic and nearly confessional, except the poet assures us in an interview: "I don’t keep a journal. I just have various small notebooks where I write down stray lines, observations, ideas. I write in scraps. Scraptures!"
Nduka parses relationships between relatives and strangers, as well as citizens and their environments, challenging: "I don't give a damn / about the conquest / of nature // conquer yourself first / (ain't you nature?)" He transports us to a fantastical headspace where "roots grow brighter" and a poetics unfurls "as naked as / the music we make." Somehow simultaneously laconic and sprawling, reading Bainbridge Island Notebook is an intensely gratifying experience that will take you on a startling adventure, swerving between verse and prose. "The sun loves your rebellion."
People are Saying:
In Bainbridge Island Notebook, the measure of pleasure is found in the social fact of song. Sparkling with erotic charges and moral conundrums, Uche Nduka detonates novelty in the name of love. His short lines create the rhythmic force of news that William Carlos Williams celebrated. This is poetry new, brave, and boisterous.
—Charles Bernstein
The poems in Bainbridge Island Notebook bend and blur eros with the ordinary. We read to touch, title, and color. The poems gently invite the reader into their web of anticipation, and desire—line by line, an event horizon.
—Erica Hunt
Uche Nduka does not walk around his subject. He exposes it. In Bainbridge Island Notebook, he asks: “how did happiness get to be so distorted?” Born in Nigeria and living in America, this is the condition this poet of the erotic greets daily. Intimate moments entwined with cosmic dislocation.
—John Yau
About the Author:
Uche Nduka is an itinerant poet-professor and essayist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 13 volumes of poems of which the latest are Fretwire and Scissorwork. Nduka’s work has been translated into Finnish, German, Romanian, Arabic, Turkish, Italian, and Dutch. His essays on music, poetry, mortality and travel have appeared in various online and print outlets. He teaches at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and Queens College-CUNY.