Go Home

Go Home is a book of poems that follows Yu, a failed performance artist who returns from abroad after a particularly vicious xenophobic encounter. Bruised in body and spirit, he takes a flight back to what used to be, expecting familiarity to stitch him back together. Instead, he lands in Digi City, a hypermodern sanctuary forged in the aftermath of global collapse, where shifting geopolitics and the resurgence of the Òrìṣà have reshaped the fate of melanated people.

Beneath the polished glass and sacred infrastructure, however, something festers. The xenophobia Yu fled has taken a different form. It is inter-ethnic here, wrapped in the language of preservation and pride. Nostalgia greets him in fragments, but belonging eludes him.

Before he can untangle his dislocation, Yu is pulled through the giant mirror in his childhood home; dragged by his own reflection into an underworld spectacle. There, a cherubic showrunner stages cockfights and illegal MMA tournaments for unseen elites. Survival becomes, quite literally, performance. By grit and accident, Yu emerges as the last man standing. By sweeter fate, he encounters an old lover who warns him: no one wins against the house.

Together they steal the showrunner's modified ride and flee through the neon jungle toward the pier and the lagoon, pursued by powers more sinister still-drones, centaurs, an anthropomorphic bat and the Committee of Thundergods Internationale.

Because while home is the place you long for, sometimes escape is the only way to redefine what it could look like.