Reviews
See what readers, critics, and literary publications are saying about the work.
Kwame Come Home
“What Okonkwo has created is an important book. It bears witness to a crisis that kills thousands annually but remains largely absent from African literature…”
The Journal of African Youth Literature”
“Vanessa’s grief is not quiet. It is active. She searches. She prays. She consults seers. She turns even to practices outside her faith, not out of confusion but out of desperation…”
Ikike Arts
A Cry For Mercy
“Reminiscent of Old Testament poetic books Lamentations, Job, Ecclesiastes and Psalms, to which these free-verse poems explicitly refer, Okonkwo’s first volume of his Escape from the Unseen Dungeons is populated by a host of personified beings like a medieval Psychomachia, a battle of spirits or soul combat, where opposing abstractions wage war against each other in an earnest contest for the narrator’s soul…”
Writers Space Africa
“Okonkwo takes us on a journey of many boulevards constituting different tangles of questions, lodged from experiences as he seeks answers by clamoring with anomalies responsible for his disturbed soul…”
The Lagos Review
“Within the book’s pages, life’s most profound struggles and sorrows are distilled into poignant questions – questions that serve as a cathartic release, a passionate plea, and a bold inquiry into the divine…”
Bella Naija
“It’s like a diary—frustrated monologues & aching contemplations—mistakenly left in the open. Who writes letters, you wonder, in this age, especially to an all-knowing God?”
Sevhage
“Peter Okonkwo’s philosophical—religious, even—quest in Fate, in the Dungeon of Doom has the potency to spur a reader to re-examine the debate on the ‘difference’ between poetry and philosophy…”
The Nigerian Review, (Fate in the Dungeon of Doom)
“…Although How the Demons Leave offers some clarity, it gathers its own clouds of mysteries…”
Conscio (for How the Demons Leave)