Affection & Other Accidents, a bold sequel to his critically acclaimed A Woman’s Body is a Country, audits the end of a romantic relationship in a world ravaged by a contagious disease. These poems—particularly the devastatingly beautiful title prose poem and masterful lyrical “The Anatomy of Silence”— explore the poet’s thoughts on unrequited love and grief as much as they bear witness to the five cities and three continents across which the relationship unravels. Inadvertently, politics, both local and global, including George Floyd’s murder, Me Too movement and the Covid-19 pandemic, seeps into these lyrical poems styled like a 90s R&B LP record and punctuated with poetic interlogues.

Dami Ajayi(Author)