[04/14/26] Jideofor, Chiagoziem: local remedies

Host Publications, paperback

Publication Date: April 14, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Chiagoziem Jideofor’s debut collection, local remedies, dismantles colonial histories and reshapes them. Exploring Igbo stories through memory, myth, and strangeness, Jideofor testifies to the nonlinear experience of trauma. What does it mean to process trauma as the child of parents who survived a war, a genocide? How do inherited wounds emerge unexpectedly in the body, in the mind, in a family? In local remedies, histories are refracted, and like sun through rain, these poems scatter a different light—one which illuminates our shared need for remedies, both old and new.

Humorous and wise, the poet is a sojourner speaking in a voice that reverberates with the intensity and resilience of many voices. Here, sovereignty does not belong to the individual, but to the collective, which sings “reviving hymns” while acknowledging the deepest communal pain points, inviting us to share in this humanity. 

In Igbo culture, names are given as symbols, as prophecies, as charms spoken to reverse the family curse. In naming this collection, Jideofor speaks into existence an antidote to colonial paradigms, which stigmatize being “local” or “from the village” as unsophisticated, naïve. Instead, she crowns this moniker with “remedies,” bestowing it with the regenerative magic of food and water, of family gathered and names given, reaffirming the sacredness of every local remedy that has been lost.  

A traditional prayer invokes: May what has the color of gold happen for us. And local remedies helps us to see that gold is the color of what grows when together, we laugh, sow, and grieve, “raising songs and prayers / on account of the seed.”