Nimi Wariboko finds a way to hold life’s contradictions inside something that can disappear with a touch. In Soap Bubble, his latest poetry collection, the delicate, fleeting object becomes a way of thinking about the things that make us human: joy and sorrow, gain and loss, memory and the present. Published by Guernica Editions in April 2026, the 100-page collection considers how much of life can exist at once, even when nothing lasts forever.

The image of a soap bubble offers Wariboko more than a metaphor for life’s brevity. Its beauty depends on its fragility; its existence is inseparable from the possibility of its disappearance. The collection draws on this tension to explore the contradictions of human experience, moving between the mystical and the mundane, pleasure and misery, abundance and absence. Rather than separating these experiences into neat opposites, Wariboko attends to how they coexist, often within the same moment.

This interest in the complexity of human life runs through Wariboko’s work as a poet and philosopher. He is the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics and Director of African Studies at Boston University, where his scholarship engages questions of ethics, society, and African thought. His previous poetry collections include Kálábárí Témétéín Ékwen, written in the Kalabari-Ijo language, and Antennae. He has also written extensively on the relationship between literature, philosophy, and the Nigerian world. 

In Soap Bubble, that breadth of intellectual inquiry meets a poetic style the publisher describes as spare and accessible. The poems approach familiar turns in human life with an eye for what might otherwise go unnoticed, finding room for philosophical reflection in ordinary experience. The result is a collection interested not only in the uncertainty of being alive but also in the pleasures that make that uncertainty worth inhabiting.

Wariboko’s title ultimately gestures towards a way of seeing life without demanding that it become permanent to be meaningful. Like a bubble catching the light before it bursts, a moment can be beautiful precisely because it cannot be held indefinitely. Soap Bubble invites readers to sit with that impermanence and consider the strange, contradictory fullness of being human.

Here’s the synopsis:

In Soap Bubble, Nimi Wariboko uses the fragile, fleeting beauty of soap bubbles to explore the contradictions of human existence. Across a range of poetic forms and styles, the collection considers the coexistence of happiness and sadness, gain and loss, past and present, and the mystical and everyday dimensions of human life. Through spare, accessible poems, Wariboko reflects on life’s rhythms, uncertainties, and pleasures.

Buy Soap Bubble here.