The Arithmetic of Ash and Other Poems

By Kemi Atanda Ilori

The Arithmetic of Ash and Other Poems
by Kẹ́mi t nd l ri

In these haunting and intellectually charged poems, Kemi Atanda Ilori navigates the fragile borderlands between memory and ruin, faith and disillusionment, myth and history. The Arithmetic of Ash and Other Poems is a meditation on what remains after the fires of loss, exile, violence, longing, and time have completed their difficult calculations.

Drawing from Yoruba cosmology, biblical cadences, postcolonial anxieties, philosophical inquiry, and the fractured consciousness of the modern world, Ilori constructs a poetic landscape inhabited by prophets, tricksters, mourners, birds, prisoners, wanderers, and unreliable witnesses. Across these pages, ash becomes both residue and revelation: the dust of burnt empires, exhausted certainties, failed loves, broken nations, and yet also the fertile remnant from which meaning stubbornly rises again.

Stylistically restless and richly polyphonic, these poems move between lyric intensity, metafictional play, satire, lamentation, chant, and public theology. Ancient oral traditions collide with contemporary geopolitics; Yoruba praise poetry converses with Eliot, Soyinka, biblical lament, and postmodern fragmentation. The result is a body of work at once deeply African and unmistakably global in its imaginative reach.

At once elegy and interrogation, The Arithmetic of Ash and Other Poems asks enduring questions: What survives catastrophe? What truth can still be trusted in an age of spectacle? What does it mean to remain human amid the debris of history?

This is poetry that refuses consolation while remaining fiercely attentive to transcendence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 191060934X
• ISBN13: 9781910609347
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Universal Books UK
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"