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The Naming

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (Author)

9781496244703

Paperback / softback, published 1 December 2025

80 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg

The Naming is the story of surrender, how the child surrenders to the parent, and the adult to the infant. Thus, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto creates themself, a poet, a multiplicity of voices, in language that is familiar but entirely new. Beginning with incantations, the collection seems to collect from antiquity and carry the reader on a current of sound through actual historical moments, reverie, confession, and fantasy. The poems recraft the traditional dialogue between life and magic, to the disturbances of the present, in a language that is vivid and resonant. These poems deliver us to the knowledge of what it means to be human, and African, in humor and reverence and wonder.”—Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, author of The Everyday Wife and ice cream headache in my bone
“Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s The Naming engraves in language lineages that whisper through his fingers. And thus, he never separates himself from the grounding of his spiritual force fields. These poems, of such interior strength and wonder, intone wisdoms only found on the outskirts of our parochial facades. The result? The Naming makes peace with historical wounds and spurs us to live in complete astonishment.”—Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022 and The Absurd Man

The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to ancestry. The poems in this collection examine the various ways one remains tied to their ancestors by reimagining memories, history, homesteads, migration, and the intersections of the past, present, and possible futures. Through this exploration, the collection seeks to rebuild a world that doesn’t merely replicate realities but reinvents, enshrines, and restories them.

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s poems offer a vital contribution to African cultural studies through their focus on Igbo heritage and ancestry.

Acknowledgments

Our Fathers’ Fathers

A Call at Dawn

Appraisal

Unfurling

Naming

Marley’s Lyrics in Two Parts or Where Does It Hurt the Most?

What I Said to God, Chukwu Ọ̀kịké

The Story of Chinụalụmọgụ Not Looking for Anything with His Lazy Eyes

Memorabilia

What Chinụalụmọgụ Made with Clouds

Once Upon a Time the Teeth

The Navel

Here

The Actual Story About the Keloid on Chinụalụmọgụ’s Left Arm

Colors

The Gift

Teaching My Nephew

There Is a New Philosophy Now Called Kwechiri, to Persevere

The Measure of Lost Things

Itches

The Robin in My Heart

Worries

Once Upon a Girl, a Place of History

Chinụalụmọgụ Sits on His Balcony Pretending He Is a Parcel

Worries

The Teenager Who Became a Mother

What They Say I Do Not Carry Well

A Dead Son Does Not Answer the Phone

The World Will Never Run Out of Bad News

Ọzụbụlụ

Úgà

Monochrome Photos with Fragments in a Closet

As Seeing Is a Kind of Brightness

Okụzụ

At the Darien Gap

Dear Hope

Finding

Ìkwìkwíī, Sweet Night Bird, by the Lamp on a Dim-Lighted Street

Ọbashị

Confession

Chinụalụmọgụ’s Therapist Kept Smiling at His Tricks

Web

A Page from Chinụalụmọgụ’s Diary

Foregrounding

Falling Oranges

A Gift from Ọlisa Eloka, the One from Umuchu, to His Dearest Friend, Chinụalụmọgụ, Who Received It on the Afternoon of the Third Day After His Traditional Marriage to Mmesoma

Mercy

Clarity

On Chinụalụmọgụ Once Living in Lincoln, Nebraska

Forgiveness

A Call’s Dusk

Notes

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