THE EMPIRE SCHOOLHOUSE AND OTHER POEMS

The Empire Schoolhouse and Other Poems is a sweeping, unflinching collection that interrogates the enduring legacies of empire - its schoolrooms, scriptures, surveys, and systems - and the unbroken spirits that resisted, survived, and reclaimed. Across its movements, Ilori charts the grammar of conquest and the refusal to be finished. He gives voice to ballots and burning bushes, to forests that became second scriptures, to rebellions that shook thrones, and to everyday people whose quiet dignities outlived the architects of domination. These poems are at once indictment and invocation, lament and laughter, archive and altar. Witty, wise, and deeply humane, this collection insists that the story is not only what as imposed, but also what was imagined, endured, and inherited. It is a poetry of reckoning - and renewal.