Lee, Young Lee by Owólabi Aboyade

Lee, Young Lee is a book of poems and a ceremony of mourning. Its words and images trace echoes of grief from Aboyade’s brother Lee’s transition after suicide. The chapbook is a living portrait of the way that loss painfully resonates through a family. In this compact book, we experience a spiritual reckoning, a sharp inhalation, a sigh, a road opening ritual, a Detroit ghost story.

What readers have to say:

Chace “Mic Write” Morris

Owolabi Aboyade's new book, "Lee, Young Lee", is a living text. The poems pull you in with a brotherly arm. They breathe, grieve & laugh with you, and you find yourself holding the book like a sweet ritual to return to. Aboyade provides lush Detroit mysticism--a spiritual jit of poetry--zigging & switching between breathtaking leaps of verse that leave your imagination twirling, and front porch musicality shooting-the-breeze between homies that feels like reunion. If you've ever lost someone in what felt like too soon, unsure of what to do with words unsaid, love yet shown, "Lee" is a salve, and a pocket manual for how to articulate what remains into healing. - Chace “Mic Write” Morris, TETRA, Poet/ MC/ Educator, 2024 Kresge Arts Fellow

Rana Tahir

Poems that sing and punch at the same time. Aboyade approaches the subjects of suicide, family trauma, and love with precision even in the uncertainty. The first poem opens, “Where are the brother-bodied / holes in these recollections?” and the question haunts every poem that follows. The brother-bodied holes are found within the suicide itself but also in the memories of kicking legs up in laughter, in every childhood moment of absence, in a troubled marriage, in the bullet itself, shooting through page after page, poem after poem, into lines that break you in their breaks, “Why is your mother screaming / like that?” – Rana Tahir, Poet and Choose Your Own Adventure author

Brennan Lucas Staffieri

Lee, Young Lee is a powerful expression of the living grief that sits with those who mourn. It sees the grief in the past, present, and future. It swirls around the speaker throughout the collection, and the speaker refuses to turn away from it.

Aboyade has a powerful and unique voice that transforms this collection and his grief into something beautiful and universally understandable. The love evident in this collection is so palpable that it insists you continue, because such love insists on remaining in our hands. Love like this must be held close.

For anybody who has experienced loss, you will find yourself and those you love in this work. -Brennan Lucas Staffieri, poet and educator