Aubade at Night or Serenade in the Morning by Taofeek Ayeyemi

Taofeek Ayeyemi’s collection, Aubade at Night or Serenade in the Morning, without fear, calls out police corruption, abuse, and exploitation in Nigeria. These powerful and brave poems weave together nation and body, political and personal, loathing and reverence for a homeland that is “…a clot of spilled blood / and everyone has his fingers / reeking of redness.” Taofeek's collection is simply stunning, haunting, needed and beautifully so; each poem leaves you wrecked and in awe. Poem by poem, Ayeyemi builds a bruised and wounded world in which we understand that the unfathomable exists, but that hope will not be crippled as “the power we tuck in our minds will make a walking stick / it will make for the journey an undying light. call it a legacy.”

Tayve Neese

Executive Editor, Trio House Press and Banyan Review

In Aubade at Night or Serenade in the Morning, Taofeek Ayeyemi writes  “‘there are things that poetry can’t cure,’/but” as he goes on to say “silence is dangerous it casts a noise-proof/veil against the voices of the crying & the dying." What Ayeyemi orbits in his stunning collection is a perpetual violence and resilience spinning in an endless cycle “because living, for me, is to die a daily death & be birthed again into mirth.”  This collection, with the vastness of Ayeyemi’s poetic language, explores multitudes—from the corruption of a country, to love’s heartbreak, from familial lore to the spirit/ual underpinnings of life in this world. Reading Ayeyemi’s words is like spending time with a sacred text.

Sara Lefsyk

Editor-in-Chief, Ethel Zine & Micro Press