Terminal Maladies, Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Okwudili Nebeolisa's debut poetry collection, is a tender chronicle of the years leading to his mother's death from cancer.
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." (Later, amputating the whole leg became the only option.) The poet describes "the sturdy cypress of her body, struggling/ to survive" and "sorrow, like a phlox/ unfurling under the moon's light" to overtake the family, threatening to leave "the house a mango savagely eaten to its kernel."
Throughout, Nkoli held firm to her Catholic faith, attending church and watching miracle sessions on television; her son wished "I could believe the same way// my mother believed in her God,/ even when the cancer did not allow her/ to walk." "Open Windows" takes on her voice; elsewhere, Nebeolisa uses the second person, sometimes to address her directly. The book's autobiographical vignettes also depict political turmoil in Nigeria--kidnappings and regime changes--and express Nebeolisa's guilt for moving to the United States. There he could be unguarded about his sexuality, but was only able to help by sending money, leaving the daily care work to his siblings.
This beautiful bereavement memoir in verse gilds illness and grief with lyrical attention. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck