Knoxville, TN―Sundress Publications announces the release of Ugochukwu Damian Okpara’s I Know the Origin of My Tremor, an elegiac collection that tugs at the nerves of our deepest yearnings. These poems explore the types and shades of loss that humankind can experience and the vibrant sorrow that loss can elicit. They dig through grief, the body, loneliness, longing, and gender dysphoria, making this collection unforgettable in its haunting vulnerability. Here, you will find a father’s ghost hovering, tremors earthquaking the page, and a narrator searching to untangle themselves from the in-between.
A striking testament to survival, I Know the Origin of My Tremor
reminds us how boldly a body can long for something.
Lannie Stabile, author of Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, says, “I Know the Origin of My Tremor tries again and again to be a collection of queer joy, but joy is not often found in a world that wishes you dead. So, you learn to hide the body of desire, to dig a hole and bury it deep. After all, as Damian writes, ‘Fear is the language that saves us.’”
Jake Sheff, author of Looting Versailles and A Kiss to Betray the Universe, writes that this collection “weaves the personal and universal into a world at once both familiar and strange. This collection makes the line come true: You will rejoice at remembering how “joy falls like freshwater,” and that desire really can “dance like fire.” To rephrase this terrifically talented poet, grief and forgetting have nothing on these poems.”
I Know the Origin of My Tremor is available to download for free on the Sundress website: click here
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, Nigerian writer & poet, is an alumnus of the SprinNG Fellowship, and Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop held annually by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. His works appear in African Writer, Barren Magazine, The Penn Review, 20.35 Africa, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. In 2019, he was the 1st Runner Up in the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. He was also a contributing interviewer for Poetry at Africa in Dialogue.
A 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
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