Overview

Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes by Catherine Okoronkwo is a bilingual collection of extraordinary range and emotional depth, rooted in grief, faith, protest, and cultural inheritance. Switching fluently between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Igbo, the poems navigate personal and collective histories of mourning, displacement, resilience and renewal. Okoronkwo draws on Christian iconography, ancestral memory, and everyday experience to craft a poetics that is intimate yet unflinching, lyrical yet politically alert. The work moves between continents, languages, and registers, holding space for lament as well as celebration, and affirming survival as a sacred, dynamic act.

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9781917617468

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Reviews

A really exceptional collection, leading us into the thorny boundaries between languages and cultures, between life and death, trust and betrayal, faith and scepticism, tradition and the urgently contemporary. Catherine Okoronkwo is emerging as a powerful and transformative poetic voice, confident in negotiating all these painful transitions between worlds. - Lord Rowan Williams, These poems are reflections on faith, time, grief, love and life. In short, these are poems which speak to what it means to be human. We love and we lose, and through it all, the hopeful know that there is always more. - Dr Chika Unigwe These poems carry a voice that feels both intimate and universal, drawing us into the rawness of grief while offering a way through it. In a world so divided, Catherine Okoronkwo reminds us of what we share - love, loss, memory - and why we need one another to endure. This is a collection that feels urgently necessary, and deeply human. - Eve Naden

Author Information

Catherine Okoronkwo, of Nigerian heritage, grew up in the Middle East and studied in the West. She holds an MA with distinction and PhD in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her writings have been anthologised: 'The Killing' and 'Uncle Blessing', Elevator Fiction (Commonword, 2016); 'The Change', Crossings Over (University of Chester, 2017); 'Rage Rises', Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World (Civic Leicester, 2020); 'Biafra', Where We Find Ourselves (Arachne Press, 2021); 'Aliens Live', Poetry and Settled Status for All (Civic Leicester, 2022). Her debut collection of poetry, Blood and Water ọbara na mmiri, is published by Waterloo Press (2020). She serves as a Church of England priest in London.

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