Griots Lounge Publishing Canada will release Black Passport, a debut poetry collection by Paul Akpomuje, on December 20, 2025.

Subtitled “A Migrant’s Memoir,” the collection documents the experiences of Nigerian migrants navigating life in Canada. Akpomuje traces journeys through immigration offices, airports, cities, and classrooms, examining how borders, paperwork, and diasporic placemaking shape identity and belonging.

The collection tackles the biopolitics of black African migration, surveillance, bureaucracy, and the everyday realities of moving through spaces that often treat black bodies as perpetually foreign. But Akpomuje’s approach is multifaceted. Poems like “Japa,” written in pidgin, bring humor to the narrative, while pieces like “For My Grandmother” offer intimate reflections on memory and home.

“Black Passport presents a multifaceted portrait of African migrant experiences in North America, revealing the biopolitics that shape bodies, movements, and spaces,” writes Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, author of there’s more. “The poems in the book are as vital and varied as the lives of the migrants they depict.”

Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, author of The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, notes that Akpomuje “gives us more than the lamentations of a black Nigerian migrant in Canada. He gives us reasons to laugh and squint at the same time.”

The collection moves between the vibrant and trenchant, exploring what Akpomuje calls “the everyday textures of space, movement, and memory.” It’s described as “an archive of radical remembering” that captures hope, resilience, and survival alongside the weight of displacement.

Black Passport is available for pre-order from Griots Lounge Publishing Canada.