Contraband Bodies is a debut to be reckoned with. Jide Salawu shines in this personal record of diaspora and a country lost to precarious politics. Mourning home, Salawu deploys gritty language, razor-edge imagery, decolonial poetics, and granular details to highlight the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa and beyond.

Salawu meditates on the agony of Atlantic memories and dispersal, confronting new forms of digital kinship. He creates a unique catalogue of images that map the migratory routes from the village to the city, within continental Africa, and across different diasporic landscapes. He builds on a solid canon of migration and mobility in African poetry and brings forward a powerful, new, diasporic poetic voice.

“Contraband Bodies is a poetry of movement from place to place, a poetry of landscapes, unique experiences, memories, and an enchanting assemblage of what is most inspiring. … Salawu may be young, but his poetry stands very favourably beside the best in all African poetry.” — Tanure Ojaide, writer and distinguished professor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

“For the African in Canada, exile is not just distance but a quiet undoing of self — and in Contraband Bodies, Jide Salawu gives voice to that dissonance with taut, lyrical precision, crafting poems that demand to be seen, felt, and remembered.” — Nick Makoha, poet and playwright