Litany of a Foreign Wife

Description

Litany of a Foreign Wife, Nnane Ntube’s beautifully crafted debut collection of poetry projects images of a society marked by instability, feelings of homelessness, disorientation, oppression and neglect. Through her storytelling style of poetry, she interrogates humanity’s existence in a context where life’s meanings are gradually fading and absurdities are becoming the order of the day. The poems are adorned with the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch which trigger fear, insecurity, frustration, complaints and escape, thus provoking the longing for hope, home, love and peace.

Praise for “Litany of a Foreign Wife”

Nnane Ntube’s Litany of a Foreign Wife is couched with anticipation, dread, apprehension and violence. Her poems are characterized by hints, deduction, suggestion, and implication. Sometimes her poems are couched with connotation and denotation, but most often with dismay and cruelty that will make the reader’s heart beat with trepidation. The diversity of Nnane’s imagery is extensive; her diction is far-reaching. Litany of a Foreign Wife is indeed a perplexing work of art, but it remains a veritable gem of artistic imagination that perplexes the reader. Nnane’s personae leave the reader with clues that must be unravelled, riddles that must be solved, and enigmas that must be deciphered before the final meaning of each poem is revealed. Her persona (in each of her poems) is at times direct, but most often evasive and searching for a place or someone to lean on. The entire collection is replete with suggestion and evocation that hint at enigmas within each poem in whose matrix the subject matter of the poem must be found.

— Babila Mutia, Professor of African Literature and Creative Writing, École Normale Supérieure, University of Yaounde I