Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes (PB) (2025)

Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes by Catherine Okoronkwo is a bilingual collection of extraordinary range and emotional depth, rooted in grief, faith, protest, and cultural inheritance. Switching fluently between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Igbo, the poems navigate personal and collective histories of mourning, displacement, resilience and renewal. Okoronkwo draws on Christian iconography, ancestral memory, and everyday experience to craft a poetics that is intimate yet unflinching, lyrical yet politically alert. The work moves between continents, languages, and registers, holding space for lament as well as celebration, and affirming survival as a sacred, dynamic act.