Rose Ash

Samuel A. Adeyemi’s chapbook Rose Ash is a brilliant, bitingly honest, and powerful piece of work—an art within an art form of its own making. From page to page, every line takes us by the hand into the underworld of the living and the dead, lifting every dead leaf, every dead twig or limb, piece by piece, as if this poet were a clergyman himself, or a student of the Bible. He takes on not only the Bible but also our understanding of deity, asking all the questions we would have loved to ask by his age.

Rose Ash reminds me of a young person so wise that the elders in Africa would take one look at him, or hear him speak, and say, “This is not a child at all, or a young man, but one of our ancestors coming back to earth to reprimand us or teach us the lessons we should have learned long ago.” —Patricia Jabbeh Wesley