This poetry book opens with a defiant edge. Migration-themed poems, especially those that document African relocation tales, usually highlight a traveller with the whole life stuffed into a bag. But Lilian came with more than a suitcase. She came with certificates and experience, and a CV carefully folded/ into the shape of possibility.

Migration in this book isn’t just geographical; it’s emotional. It’s not merely terrestrial; it’s
astronomical. It’s less about arrivals than departures; less about new dreams, more about the ones abandoned. The migrant is a paragon of paradoxes, a coin of adventure, bearing memories of exits and advents. But arrival is not an event, it’s a process.

‘The Life I Learnt to Carry’ is a journal that reflects on grief as a form of migration, migration as a form of betrayal, and loneliness as a form of grief. Lilian Onyinye Okoloye’s collection of fifteen poems is a narrative exploration of mental displacement, resilience and transformation. The diction is conversational, bereft of the figurative, and heavily reliant on emotional honesty and existential sentiments. The chapbook features short-lined, prose-driven free verse.

The first poem, ‘The Job Hunt’, spans six pages.
‘Culture shock’, the shortest poem in the collection, has seventy-two lines spread across four pages. Lilian’s poems come unfiltered and dedicated to didacticism. But poetry demands precision of language. It begs brevity and intensity.

Okoloye can be more artistic with her titling too. Titles like ‘When You Left’, ‘The Day I Got Lost’, ‘Learning the Roads’ kill curiosity. Titles are meant to elicit intrigue and create suspense. They set the foundation for creative twists.

‘Trust has a Price’, unlike the opening poem, deals with a different kind of rejection. The poet persona is processing a betrayal, coming to a realisation that every departure is a call to a new beginning, an invitation to explore new promises, embrace green experiences in unfamiliar terrains.
The loss of a loved one leads to a surrendering. Because grief is not a straight road. / It circles. / It returns.
It takes you back to self. Mourning takes you through a season of moulting; a period of
introspection and rebirth.

“I am becoming:
softer with people,
wiser with boundaries”
[Trust has a Price]

Sorrow is a big burden to bear. Love is something you carry forever. Perhaps this would explain the poet skirting memories, avoiding specifics, and seeking escape in abstracts. But poetry is confrontation. The verse, beyond structure, thrives in truth and mysteries. A poem comes naked, unencumbered by the need to deliver self-help wisdom or moral commentary. It is a participatory art; the writer invites the reader to interrogate the expressed, contemplate the inferred.

Moving to a new country is a different kind of loss. A peculiar variant of absence. You sacrifice relationships, careers, and a lifestyle in pursuit of dreams. Departures leave you with wounds. And with exits, there are no closures, just memories.

Nursing a loss can be a lonely journey. You are never prepared enough for a relocation. You find yourself stuck in the margin, tossed between hope and grief. In ‘The country I Imagined’, the poet laments. She would trade the new quiet and the cold for things she erstwhile moaned about back home. It’s the pain of growth. The torture of unlearning and relearning; harnessing resources and building confidence.

“I arrived with plans
Then reality started
editing them”

[Money Had Other Plans]

The poet persona learns to carry home; bend without breaking.

“Perhaps that is what starting again
really means: not forgetting where
you came from”
[The Country I Imagined]

The author refers to resilience as an amazing oxymoron (page 12). This is the most thought-provoking expression in this collection. An oxymoron technically has two words. But rather than dismiss the interesting submission, I explored the etymology of the word. Resilience is from a Latin verb ‘resilire’ (re-salire), which means “to jump back” or “rebound” or “recoil”. In physics, resilience is the ability of a material to absorb energy when it is stretched. In psychology, resilience is a metaphor for the dynamic nature of the mind in adjusting to challenges and trauma. Resilience is a function of time and will, and not necessarily a strength. It’s a human attribute. Every human eventually rebounds with enough motivation.

The migrant’s baggage, while navigating new cultures and existential complexities, is largely mental. Finding safe communities (and friendships) eases the saddle; that is loneliness, defeated. But absence cannot be filled with activities or new memories. ‘The Weight of Ordinary Days’ shows us that mundane events and everyday interactions are dress rehearsals for future grieves. The poem closes the book on an emotive note, reminding readers to cherish every moment spent with loved ones, because they eventually become the memories that hold the space when there’s a transition of any form.

“So now,
when family gathers,
I try to stay a little longer.
When someone speaks,
I listen.
When laughter fills the room,
I let it.
When there is food on the table,
I remember
that tables do not remain full forever.”

The book is available via https://selar.com/vp0194858i

Jide Badmus
Author, Dawn is an Open Wound

Jide Badmus is a poet and literary critic; author of five poetry books including Dawn is an Open Wound (Noirledge Publishers, 2026) and eight pamphlets. He is the poetry editor for Con-scio Magazine, a mentor in the SprinNG Writers fellowship, and a member of the Board of Advisors for Libretto Magazine.

Jide’s works have been published in The Rumpus, Black Bough Poetry, The Nigeria Review, Agbowo, and elsewhere. He writes from Nottingham, United Kingdom