"Chris Abani's poetry resonates with a devastating beauty which cuts through to the heart of human strength."-Pride

Hands Washing Water is Chris Abani's fourth poetry collection-a mischievous book of displacement, exile, ancestry, and subversive humor. The central section, "Buffalo Women," is a Civil War correspondence between lovers that plays on our assumptions about war, gender, morality, and politics.

Sweetest Henri,
I know we promised to be honest,
one to the other, but your recent missive,
though welcome as any epistle from you,
filled me with a dread that clung
like dampness to wet wood. I am terrified
for your immortal soul, dear sweet Henri.
This mad war of Lincoln is infecting you
with a sickness too depraved to even address. . .

Abani's writing is ruthless, at times traumatic, and consistently filled with surprising twists and turns.

Born in 1966 at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian civil war, Abani lived a childhood of privilege, growing up with servants, cooks, nannies, the things the typical Nigerian, locked in a continual struggle with poverty, corruption, and violence, could barely dream of. When he was 16 he published his first novel, a thriller called Masters of the Board that won awards and got him anointed “Africa’s answer to Frederick Forsyth,” an appellation he refers to now with a grin.

He was thrown in jail two years after the book was published because the government believed it served as the foundation for a failed coup attempt. Abani spent time in prison on three occasions for his “subversive” writings, once in solitary confinement in the Kiri Kiri maximum security facility that few made it out of alive. After his unexplained release, he left for England where he lived for several years before moving to the US where he now teaches at the University of California, Riverside.