"A riveting and rewarding work.” —Bertrand Bickersteth, award-winning author of The Response of Weeds: A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies

“Contraband Bodies is a poetry of movement from place to place, a poetry of landscapes, unique experiences, memories, and an enchanting assemblage of what is most inspiring. The collection draws the reader into an aesthetic exhilaration. Jide Salawu is a poet of place and the sentiments addressed to various spaces. He deploys strong images that keep alive memories of places and experiences rooted in them. His language is robust and tight, and he accomplishes the ultimate in poetic expression. His affinity for his mother is deep. His poetry displays passion and sensitivity to humans and nature. The poet achieves a major poetic accomplishment through a rigorous formula of creative expression. Salawu may be young, but his poetry stands very favorably beside the best in all African poetry.”—Tanure Ojaide, award-winning author of Songs of Myself and distinguished professor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

“In this evocative debut collection, Jide Salawu’s robust, elegiac poems both refuse and affirm the precarities of home, country, empire’s hierarchies, and the immigrant body, deftly reaching through the past to reimagine a historical present where ‘it is mortal then to dream’ that the places one comes from, that one inhabits, will not only sustain them, but offer care amidst its scarcity.”— Chelsea Dingman, award-winning author of I, Divided