Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes - by Catherine Okoronkwo (Paperback)

About the Book

Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes by Catherine Okoronkwo is a bilingual collection of extraordinary range and emotional depth, rooted in grief, faith, protest, and cultural inheritance.

Book Synopsis

Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes by Catherine Okoronkwo is a bilingual collection of extraordinary range and emotional depth, rooted in grief, faith, protest, and cultural inheritance. Switching fluently between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Igbo, the poems navigate personal and collective histories of mourning, displacement, resilience and renewal. Okoronkwo draws on Christian iconography, ancestral memory, and everyday experience to craft a poetics that is intimate yet unflinching, lyrical yet politically alert. The work moves between continents, languages, and registers, holding space for lament as well as celebration, and affirming survival as a sacred, dynamic act.

Review Quotes

A really exceptional collection, leading us into the thorny boundaries between languages and cultures, between life and death, trust and betrayal, faith and scepticism, tradition and the urgently contemporary. Catherine Okoronkwo is emerging as a powerful and transformative poetic voice, confident in negotiating all these painful transitions between worlds.

- Lord Rowan Williams,

These poems are reflections on faith, time, grief, love and life. In short, these are poems which speak to what it means to be human. We love and we lose, and through it all, the hopeful know that there is always more.

- Dr Chika Unigwe

These poems carry a voice that feels both intimate and universal, drawing us into the rawness of grief while offering a way through it. In a world so divided, Catherine Okoronkwo reminds us of what we share - love, loss, memory - and why we need one another to endure. This is a collection that feels urgently necessary, and deeply human.

- Eve Naden