Rummage

By: Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa

Narrated by: Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa

Length: 1 hr and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the 2015 Little A Poetry Contest.

A journey through girlhood, self-discovery, and the little acts of violence we inflict on one another.

In an astounding debut poetry collection, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Lambda Literary fellow Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa presents a relentless but refined portrait of one young woman's journey toward self-discovery. Her poems explore the eternal themes of the human condition - nature, origin, shame, identity, desire, mortality - with sensitivity and specificity. They illuminate and interrogate the ways that her characters inflict and experience pain, ultimately revealing how we must all face our shame in order to grow. No voice is blameless; no person is exempt. Divided into four sections, the collection is a life cycle of emotional metamorphosis: girlhood and sexuality, trauma, relationships, and grief. Rummage is a wildly courageous and lyrical book full of music, metaphor, and the power of memory.

©2017 Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved

Crystalized emotion

Would you consider the audio edition of Rummage to be better than the print version?

Yes, Oputa's voice and pacing gives much more impact than reading the poems myself.

What did you like best about this story?

So many of the poems are written as a series of vignettes which is powerful

Heavy beauty

"Rummage" is lovely, harsh and evocative in both creating vivid, sometimes stark pictures of the characters and conveying those characters’ struggles, love, confusion and so much more. To me, each poem has such an engaging rhythm and sense of movement it invites me in and makes me feel a gamut of emotions, connection and congruity with Oputa’s words. Even when I didn’t completely understand the metaphor or symbolism, I didn’t find myself lost or frustrated, I found myself lost in a way that makes me want to dive back and delve into its mysteries and obscurities. The poems deal with some heavy topics but with such a grace and knowledgeable touch in their dynamics, it’s hard not to feel an emotional lightness and catharsis.

Some of my favorites include: Ode to Shame, What the Muse Might Say If I Let Her Speak, the Portrait of Memory trio, We Are Sitting Around My Shame, After the Hour, How Not to Itch, and the entire Lessons on the Body sequence as it prodded my biologist heart. So good!