LOVE POTION
Title: A Cult Of Fireflies
Author: Naimah Abdullahi Sabo & Iliya Kambai Dennis
Number of pages: 30
Year of publication: 2024
Reviewer name: Hope Joseph
Like the way you find welcoming signs or messages imprinted on the walls of some ancient households, so is this chapbook. It welcomes you with demure verses more like the sirens in Greek mythology luring their victims to their demise, however, this time the verses aren’t luring anyone to their death, instead it’s bringing them into a presence of some epiphany about the concept of LOVE. When you enter into the house of love, you begin to see the many facets it has: the rough, the edgy and even the mysterious and unusual.
This love potion (Chapbook) as I would like to call it does not have one peculiar taste or aesthetic: sometimes it’s palatable, while sometimes it’s poignant, and sometimes they are pepperish, making you tear up like someone chewing down on a plateful of pepper soup. Isn’t that love? The good, bad and ugly!
Here, you find love bleeding. Here too, you also find love healing. In love you should not only anticipate the lovey dovey alone. You should also look forward to the wrinkled skin, the toothless grin, punctuated by a slouched chin.
Terms and conditions is a masterpiece that counters the ignoble popular opinion that love should be transactional. It’s the kind of love I want too. Something everyone secretly wants: a love where you are wholly loved. Does that sound like the biblical agape love? The divine love of God? Be the judge of that!
Speaking of love, why won’t you speak of God too? Isn’t God love? Didn’t God love us without terms and conditions? This wonderful chapbook could pass as a medicine for our deteriorating societal definition of love. In love we are patient. In love we are hurt. In love we are vulnerable. In love we are whole. In love we are blessed. In love we are happy. There is sickness in love. And there is care too. The good, the bad, the ugly. That’s love!
Read this chapbook with a receiving heart, because it is going to test your initial convictions and philosophy about what it means to love. Naimah Abdullahi Sabo & Iliya Kambai Dennis have done a tremendous amount of work here. Like the great bards before them they have done well with their ink and quills.
World, welcome to the cult of fireflies!
Bio:
Hope Joseph is an essayist and poet. He writes from Nigeria, West Africa. His works are forthcoming or already published in Notre Dame, Christian Science Monitor, Augur, Stormbird, SolarPunk, Riddlebird, Reckoning, The Sunlight Press, A Longhouse, MukoliMag, Flute, Wizard In Space, Curio Cabinet, Speculative City, Timber Ghost Press, IBUA, SprinNG, Evening Street Press, Zoetic Press, Spillwords, Writers Space Africa, and more. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. A joint winner for SEVHAGE/Agema Founder’s Prize for Creative Non-Fiction. He’s a reader for reckoning press. He was a fellow in the 2021 SprinNG Writing Fellowship. He tweets @ItzJoe9 & IG: _hope_joseph_writes website: https://mssg.me/3j5ka
