Autobiomythography of
Autobiomythography of
Ayokunle Falomo
"...Falomo, a native Nigerian who resides in Houston, Texas, pulls apart the fabric of what it means to be both Nigerian and American, father and son, real and myth. ... Autobiomythography of is a proverbial multiversity of meeting, challenging and reconciling with one's self. Ayokunle Falomo uses brave and inventive form, coupled with fables and mythology, to chart a journey of finding love and joy for oneself. Ending with its own ode to joy, the book makes space to celebrate the failures, the hopes, the dreams, and the decisions that keep us up at night. It builds a bridge between culture, religion, and identity, proving 'memory is the greatest myth.'"
—Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Muzzle Magazine
September 2024
ISBN: 9781949944655
Available in both print and digital formats. Digital format requires manual delivery. Please allow 1 business day for processing time.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published in print and online publications: The New York Times, Houston Public Media, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, New England Review, Write About Now among others. You can find more information about him at afalomo.com.
Additional Praise:
"Mythmaking serves to create a bridge between what the human mind can understand and what we yet have language for. Yet here in this visually lush and lyrically dexterous collection of poems, Falomo offers his readers work that bends and reimagines the limits of language, blends the Divine with the digital present, contemporary music with the voices of the past while the speaker traverses the friction between their American & Nigerian heritage."
—I.S. Jones, author of Spells of My Name
"Drawing on the Bible and mythology, [Falomo] spins meditations on genealogy and describes himself as if from the outside, via others’ perceptions ("If Found,") and erasure of official forms. "To You in Your Dark Lake Moving Darkly Now" is addressed to his child in utero, and a major theme is figuring out how to be a father differently from one’s own father ... I was impressed."
—Rebecca Foster, Bookish Beck
“At the core of Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography of is a restless poet contending with myth as both vehicle for possibility and rigid construct of belief. Such a tension makes a means by which Falomo examines freedom and its foreclosure, the transformations they work on the self, love, Africa, flesh, ancestry, and artmaking. Omnivorously imaginative, slyly comedic, and disarmingly elegiac, Autobiomythography of is a bold and lively run at “something much more mutable…, something that can’t be penned or pinned down.”
—Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
More by Ayokunle Falomo:
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
Featured:
