In Dawn is an Open Wound, Jide Badmus transforms communal lament about Nigeria into lyric poems pulsating with intimacy and despair. Dami Ajayi, author of Clinical Blues and Affection and Other Accidents.
It is not often we hear that a poet has changed his style, especially for a poet like Jide Badmus, who is erroneously pigeonholed as an apolitical poet, known for his acute exploration of the body, sexuality and desire without paying attention to how politics is involved, or is imbricated within the three themes mostly associated with him. Dawn is an Open Wound is a book entirely "new" in his bourgeoning poetic oeuvre in which Jide Badmus writes about different, differing themes not just with fresh metaphor couched in a new poetic idiom, but in the way in which, within so short a time, he has radically reinvented not just style and poetics but more profoundly his political consciousness. Even in those poems which appear not overly "political", the poet broaches political concern most memorably in "The World is a Bat" whose refrain any Nigerian would easily discern and relate with.
Ismail Bala, poet, scholar, and author of Memory of Departure.
