Ahmed, Hussain: Blue Exodus

Orison Books, paperbackPublication Date: July 2, 2024Publisher Marketing: Blue Exodus, Hussain Ahmed's second full-length poetry collection, was selected by Rajiv Mohabir as the winner of The 2022 Orison Poetry Prize. About the collection, Mohabir writes, "I come away with the specters of the living and passed, asking me what it means to live as a story lives, to write a life's ghost into poem." This book charts a heart's history of home, war, dispossession, and displacement, as well as the human solidarity and sacred rituals that remain despite the loss of so much else. Populated by moons and oceans and birds, as well as missiles and gun magazines, these lush poems carry profound grief but also adamantine hope.   Hussain Ahmed is Nigerian, poet, and environmentalist. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, A Pu