About Chinua Ezenwa Ohaeto
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (@ChinuaEzenwa) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. He won the 2018 Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, Italy, and the 2022 Special ANMIG poetry prize, organized by the Centro Giovanni e Poesia di Truiggio, Italy. In 2023, he was a runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition, Memorial University, Canada and in the African and African-American Studies Program Contest hosted by UNL’s Institute for Ethnic Studies. He is the author of The Naming (Nebraska Press, 2025). His works have appeared in Joyland, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, Massachusetts Review, and The Republic.
A Profile of the Author
Notes on the work
These poems arose from a place of intimate reckoning with loss—specifically, the death of my father and the continued presence of his memory in the natural world around me. In “What I Know from the Leftover of Our World,” I was thinking of how mourning can take the form of renewal, how planting a tree becomes a gesture of grief and of gratitude. The poem tries to hold onto that paradox—how we carry our dead with tenderness without allowing grief to consume those who are alive.
“I Wrote on the Blackboard about the Moon Halved by the Arms of God” was written later, when I began to realize that memory, like the moon, has its own cycles of fullness and absence. It borrows from my sister’s belief that “everything around us is still inside of us,” which became the emotional anchor of the poem. The challenge was not in writing about my father’s death, but in writing toward what remains alive in the aftermath—the gestures, the resemblances that survive us.
Both poems surprised me in how they resisted closure. They began as elegies but grew into meditations on continuity—on how the natural world holds, mirrors, and heals our private griefs.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
Lately, I have been returning to music that feels like prayer— Bob Marley, BurnaBoy, Asa, and Fela records. I listen while in my bed thinking about life and its incongruities, especially how we always struggle to find meaning in everything happening to us. I have tattoo bands on my left arm, it reminds of my father and mother. My mother is much alive. I also think about my home in Nigeria—how the air seemed filled with something ancient, familiar, disorienting and forgiving.
I am learning to cook again, slowly, because I must. Simple meals: jollof rice, roasted plantain, fish and sometimes just boiled yam with palm oil and salt. I find peace in the preparation—the slicing, stirring, and waiting. In this way, I slow my day down, especially when I am struggling with writings or with the anxiety of my new collection, The Naming, coming December 1.
Finally, what brings me the deepest calm these days is sleeping. In this way, the world, for me, feels whole again, if only for a breath.
