Memories of storytelling or poems alongside essays about “why I write” means we are laced with this trouble of forgetting about the spotlight, comparable to Arinze Ifeakandu’s capturing in New City, “to be in a city is to be lost in the midst of inanimate things, to be swallowed up by bricks giants and bright lights.” We take in a dosage of heart-breaking tales before we can get the first glimpse of light or hope or anything beautiful. Yet the only way to fully absorb this gift is to get them together, standing each work next to the artist, but even then, we ask, not knowing for certain, how beauty resides in ugly places? Returning to Arinze Ifeakandu’s words, “but they must embrace their city whose roads remain the same death-traps but whose sky is as beautiful as any,” we understand that even the floods can make the grounds grow tender.

Every emptiness that words find, they fill. These new voices covering the pages of this curation leave so much room for exchanging laughter and reflections, anger, and pleasure, refusing to conform and spinning tales into what has been largely unknown. It is safe to say that all who have chosen the way of words will bear the name writers. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the very essence of literature is that “you discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone.” This anthology highlights the yearnings of writers and the desire of readers that is not just African but largely human.

In reading this collection, for instance, there is a catch: the writer approaches the work, the work doesn’t come to the writer. The storytellers go to their stories, and poets go to their poems. The writers may resent why they started writing at first but do not contest the contribution to their progress. Hence, we trace a writer’s tone in the word choice and how the texts make the reader feel. Even though the tones for a few other writers span a wide array of styles, from terse to prosaic, everyone seems to know what audience to speak to.