For the author of ‘Flowers at The City of Dreams,’ Aisha A. Bolaji, it is important to contextualise the nation’s challenges and proffer solutions.

Over the years, Nigeria has produced a lot of contemporary poetry. The small press ecosystem, in the UK and at home, has provided book-length homes for some of them. Social media has also turned many young Nigerians into poets.

In all sincerity, some of these collections have no business existing. But some do. Bolaji’s Flowers at the City of Dreams, published by Witsprouts Zintle, is a debut that lands more towards the justifiable side of the scale, but the direction it leans is worth noting.

Visually, the book is interspersed with flower photographs that soften the space between pages. This is the great creative input to the production that first caught my eye. Second is the punchy dedication as already noted by an earlier reviewer. Dedicated to the courage it took to start. For us who know what it means to start anything in this country, with no infrastructure behind you and no guarantee anyone’s paying attention, that line is more than a literary flourish. It is a fact that it takes courage to start something in this country.

On the surface, this is a collection about mothers, girlhood, love and friendship. These are not misreadings. But what struck me the most, reading as a Nigerian, if it won’t give off the impression of me being a killjoy, is how much of this book is really about the exhaustion of living here. Not the sensationalised version of the headline. The quiet, ordinary sort. The kind that sits in your chest when you are stuck in traffic, or trying to do something simple that this country has decided should be complicated.

There is a poem called “Prompts” which captures this perfectly. The speaker enrolls in a writing class and the first theme is “black coffee.” She writes twenty drafts. They all come up as “black coffin.” She can’t write about simple happy things because, as she says, her survival mode won’t let it. That is a line that will hit differently depending on where you’re reading from.

“I Worry Too Much About the Wrong Things” goes even further. The speaker is fatigued. She says the word seven times. Tired of burning, tired of waking to smoke, tired of recognising the dead things of her country, tired of singing songs for things that keep happening to her. The poem might have stayed in that register and become just another complaint. But Bolaji does something sharp at the end. A stranger’s elbow hits the speaker’s mouth in a public bus and the only thing that she can think of is how tired she is of praying for salt with a wounded mouth. That last image works because it concentrates the entire weight of the poem on a single, sensory moment. We’ve all been on that bus.

“Nostalgia with Alternation in Reality” takes place in a car park in Nyanya. The speaker, crammed into a bad car, worries about the roof of her family home in Minna. She calls the city a standing aesthetic of perishable things. Someone without experience might think that this is a poetic overstatement but anyone who has driven through parts of Abuja or Jos or Minna and watched the buildings that were never finished, the roads that were fixed and then left to crack open again knows exactly what she means.

“The Stories” attempts to put the entire country into a single poem. Gunpowder ahead of Gombe. Desperate songs of Lagos and other cities where the speaker has never been, but whose suffering she takes with her. It does not argue that trans-Nigerian solidarity is easy or spontaneous. It says only: They held my hands with love in their eyes, called me sister. And so the story started. It is a gentle nod towards a national feeling that most of us suspect to be more wish than reality, and the poem is honest enough to leave that tension unresolved.

Not everything in the collection is hitting at this level. The poems lose their grip when Bolaji moves away from the specific and the grounded. “For Friends With Light In Their Teeth” imagines kids singing until their teeth are stained with light. Fine as an image but it could be set anywhere. Compare that to Prompts, where we know exactly where the speaker is, what she is trying to do and why she can’t. That difference between the two poems is the difference between a writer reaching for beauty and a writer reporting from within her own life. Bolaji is more skilled at the latter.

This is a debut, and it shows in places. Some of the poems read like earlier drafts not revised enough before printing. But underneath the writing there is instinct. Bolaji is not trying to write protest poetry or national allegory. She’s just trying to write a poem about coffee and keeps coming up with coffins and she’s honest enough to tell us that. It’s not a failing, that involuntary swerve, that inability to separate the personal from the national, the beautiful from the broken. That’s what living in Nigeria does to you, if you observe. Bolaji listens.