The Arts-Muse Fair

Title: I Wrote This for You. Author: Samira Haruna Sanusi. Page Count: 94. Publisher: Word, Rhyme and Rhythm, Abuja. Due for release on: August 19, 2017.       Reviewer: Nana Sule I wrote this for you starts as little droplets of beautifully woven words before gradually building to a rain of encouragement. Every now and then, alternating between the first person narrative and the second person, one sees pain through the eyes of the writer, and feels the torture of all that she has been through. Written as a collection of poems and quotes, the first and most noticeable strength is the clever wordplay that survived till the last page. The poems, seem unknowingly divided into four parts, although it is unclear if this was the Writers’ original intention or if by some literary miracle, the poems aligned in poetry heaven. The first set of poems talked about the acceptance of pain, in all its ramifications, emphasizing the need to let pain break and heal one.

Our Country Holds A Whip Against Us:   Requiem for a lost country Book Title: Our Country Holds A Whip Against Us Author: Abdullahi Ismaila Publisher: Kraft Books Limited Pages: 60 Year: 2017 Reviewer: Paul Liam Abdullahi Ismaila’s new poetry volume, Our Country Holds A Whip Against Us is a requiem for a lost country, Nigeria. This anthropomorphic collection is a dirge that re-enacts the depravity of social justice, maladministration and the trivialization of humanity by the political class who hold the masses in contempt; the same people who elect them into power under the tiring slaps of the sun.   The country has turned its back on the people and in consequence they no longer consider her home because she no longer holds promises of a brighter future.  The title therefore captures the decay of a country at war with itself and encapsulates the dysfunctional state of the system of things and the hopelessness that hovers above the land. And perhaps the coun

GENRE: DRAMA                                                AUTHOR: JIBRIN BALA  JIBRIN PUBLISHER: IMAGE PUBLISHERS REVIEWER: TUNJI OLADIRAN The play, The Snuff Snub in Somanzhi , shows that the Nigerian landscape where writers live is naturally prone to various problems ranging from socio-cultural, political, moral, divorce and extra-marital affairs. Therefore, playwrights are extrinsically motivated to transcribe their visual shorthand into dramatic forms and this they do because they are products of the contemporary ‘sins’ of their immediate environments. In effect, their credo or artistic consciousness reflects the experiences in human life. In the play, the theme of forced marriage continues to fester like a sore and this reveals the socio-cultural and immoral behavioral practices in the larger society. The mentality of those forced into marriage becomes severed, their perception of marriage suffers and in many cases, they flee from their