The process of navigating grief is not black and white. Through Wendy Okeke’s delicious use of language, metaphors and vivid imagery, and her colourful cover, we are drawn into a poetic world that portrays loss as an unpredictable, inevitable and deeply human occurrence. While grieving is painful, it also serves as a powerful reminder of the capacity to love deeply.
A writer, poet, storyteller and creative facilitator, Wendy brings lyrical intensity and raw introspection to her poetry collection ‘‘Grief’s First Kiss Is an Avalanche.’’ She draws us into a body of work that is fundamentally about grief but also about unabashed desire, love and its messiness, the ordinariness and complexities of life, emotion, memory, and the recollection of it, and about physical and spiritual presence—or the lack thereof.
This collection is dedicated to her father, whose love catalyses the emotional terrain of the poems in this collection. The opening poem, A Toast to a Man Who Always Lifted My Spirit, speaks to the daunting realities of loss, the resignation to an uncertain fate, the accompanying confusion, and the numbing sense of defeat. The lines, “Sometimes, I settle/into the orange feeling that / my father is my deepest loss,” exemplify this feeling very keenly. She writes, “We collect ourselves/sometimes we are outnumbered,/wounds scalding off the thickness of our memories.” The second poem, Hide & Seek, is, in some ways, about a loss of oneself and the effort made by others to ensure that this business of living is continued. Here, the persona’s mind becomes “a carnival of chaos/too loud to bury/too vivid to sleep through.” This is a poem you read while holding your breath because what is air when the potential of loss rocks you back and forth?
‘‘Grief’s First Kiss Is An Avalanche’’ captures the distortion and reality of grief: how, somehow, life continues. Human beings do human things. We find space to feel and to desire, even amidst the raw impact of loss. This is why the third poem, I Consider Being Fucked by You: A Kind of Storytelling, is daring, in title and in verse. In this poem, “bodies misshapen into new verses” and “enter into each other like confession.” Bodies memorise bodies. Memories of touch write themselves into the skin. Whether the persona in this poem is dead or alive is unclear. We are sure of a spirited presence and a desire so intense it makes this poem’s sensual and masterful recollection possible.
Grief Is My Favorite Color and About Love chronicle the physicalities of loss and what happens to those left behind. Mourners gather, a father is buried, a sister is paralysed by fear, a brother cries in secret. Here, grief does not understand subtlety. It paints the room: “When you walk into a room/where grief is the hanging painting on every wall” or “a custard paint splattered on doors.” It is overwhelming, so it makes perfect sense that the poem suggests, gently, the saving of oneself. About Love shows how grief might be the cruellest revelation of love and how disillusioned it leaves us. The lines, “splintering around her cries,/ Mike á ba ta go,/though he is not returning” are so sad. To say a person you once loved has come back home when you will never see them again is a shattering form of self-deception, one that grief often demands. What Is the Colour of Your Loss is rooted in place. There is a scene, a physical arena where loss is tangible. Grief, here, is “a quiet erosion,” one that swallows cars, treasures, photographs and laughter.
It is interesting how Wendy uses touch, bodies, and desire throughout this collection to show many emotions. This balance between the heaviness of grief and the potency of desire is exquisite.
Reckless reeks of regret. It’s a poem about all that true love could’ve done, all that fear prevented. The haunting final line, “I should have—/should have loved you,” will resonate deeply with anyone who has missed their chance to love fully.
Yellow Warmth begs the fundamental question: How can love and abuse coexist? How did women learn to make their bodies canvases of pain and master silence? The lines “Did his mother not teach him / how to hold a woman close?” do not challenge the reflex to blame women for the violence or absence of men, whether as mothers, wives or partners.
Wendy reminds us how grief drops us to our knees, how the same ground that catches us when we fall also swallows our dead. You can hear the mother scream in this poem, feel the heartbreak in the lines: “She falls— / we fall. / to hold her up,” describing the sheer interdependence of shared grief.
‘‘Grief’s First Kiss Is an Avalanche’’ is not merely a chronicle of mourning; it is also a road map toward living again. It documents the truth that life goes on, messily, uncertainly, and often with both fear and beauty. The shape of Called to the Hills on the page allows it to be read with a kind of pause and rhythm; the poem gives permission and speaks to a personal arrival: “You are no longer / the weight of / your origins.” It shows that freedom and the idea of belonging fully to oneself can be jarring, but it must be embraced.
If this book does not have an overarching theme of grief, it could stand firmly as a collection of poems written in contemplation of desire and the dynamics of human emotion. In Litany, Wendy writes: “I know fate only by the way I love to be kissed./ by how I want my thighs split open / in clean rooms, / that do not stink of grief, / silent but for the echo of our bodies.”
Wendy Okeke wrote and curated this poetry collection with intention. It is one thing to experience grief and be rendered speechless by it; it is another to do the tender, intricate work of articulating it through metaphor, language, place and poetics.
The final two poems, Threads of Grace and Falling Forward, offer a kind of closure. The former reads like a prayer, an ode to grace as something that can sandwich grief and make space for hope. The latter recognises our undoing while mapping out paths for reconstruction: “My Grandmother once told me that hope is a muted madness/the kind that sends you sprinting through avalanches.” In the end, grief will leave a lot of emptiness, but, as Wendy writes, “This is how I’ve learned to fill the void: / a big god, / a good friend, / a smile, / and just enough money in my pocket.”
For anyone who cares to listen, ‘‘Grief’s First Kiss Is an Avalanche,’’ is a heartfelt and incredibly transformative debut. You should hold this collection in your hands. It will remind you to live regardless and invite you to forsake guilt and shame, especially the kind we carry when our bodies are in need of pleasure.
© Bella Naija
