BN Book Review | Poetry Has All My Pain and Love Through the Eyes of a Naive Village Boy by Adetimilehin Inioluwa Victor

Poetry Has All My Pain and Love Through the Eyes of a Naive Village Boy, a two-part collection by Adetimilehin Inioluwa Victor, is written to be read side by side. Each part of this diptych of poems bears its own emotional resonance, but they complement one another. Poetry Has All My Pain leans toward grief, fathers, faith, suicide, sex, and shame. Love Through the Eyes of a Naive Village Boy is about longing, tenderness, love or lust at first sight, foolish crushes, and letters that may never be answered. Together, they follow the making of a Nigerian boy into a man and vice versa. The same speaker who curses his bloodline in one poem later begs a girl from biology class to build a monopoly in the market of his heart, and both emotions are valid.

The opening poem, “I Swore I’ll Never Be Like My Father,” confronts an ugly father–son dynamic, which is really the core of the entire collection. Much of this poem, and many others in the book, wrestle with the inevitability of familial relationships and resemblances, how genetics and upbringing remain forces we cannot fully outrun. Even though the speaker swears never to be like his father and has done everything possible to resist becoming the man who hurt him, the poem keeps circling back to the inescapable pull of lineage. By the fifth stanza, the poem delivers some of its most haunting lines: “But bloodlines do not forgive / They do not forget the curse of lineage / Somewhere, my unborn child may be writing a poem / Swearing he will never be like me.” The lines recall Wana Udobang’s “Conversations with My Mother,” where she writes that a mother’s trauma can bury itself inside your marrow without altering your bones. Pain and trauma are intergenerational, so it makes sense when Adetimilehin writes in “My Father’s Murders,” “What better way to love those you hate / Than to give them a shadow of yourself?”

In the next poem, “Honour”, Adetimilehin turns his attention to love and the difficult ways it forms around old wounds. His use of metaphor and imagery is commendable, especially in how he blends science and emotion to paint a resonant picture of boyhood. He writes, “But bastard boys are beautiful toxins / Every girl I ever loved was a mirror to my deadly touch / What I shared with them wasn’t just love / It’s nuclear chemistry.” That last phrase points to the chain reactions that happen when damaged boys meet unsuspecting girls. Poetry Has All My Pain is a book that takes courage to write. The continuous purgation of emotion on the page is heartfelt. In “Is Dad god?” the persona speaks about never feeling the warmth of a father. We feel the absence in lines like, “His broad shoulder is no shelter. / They do not hug, care or pamper.” The poems are unapologetic about documenting their grievances. You can’t beat a child and then tell them how to cry, but for some readers, this continuous lamentation can feel heavy. This heaviness seems intentional because just as the reader begins to notice the repetition of wounds, we meet “Another Father Poem,” whose lines read, “A boy like me is fatherhood’s waterloo/hell has no greater fury / than the vengeance of a neglected son / Moderation was never a gospel I needed.”

The kind of trauma described here toughens a person, so when in “Becoming Rock” the poet writes, “You must die to live / if you must live at all,” it is heartfelt. The poem holds a faint assurance that one can survive everything trying to wreck them and that survival might be worth it. Much of the socialisation men receive about affection and emotional expression comes from home, from the way they are raised. The poem “Dear Father” details across several pages how men grow up, generation after generation, associating masculinity with a harsh idea of strength, so they raise boys who think the same.

The latter parts of Poetry Has All My Pain widen the frame. The second section, especially the poem “A man seeks vengeance against his alter ego,” does many things, but one of its strongest elements is how it describes pleasure and lust as forces that can quite literally ruin a person: “Sensual junkie, / Old boy / high on new delusions / you know will kill you.” Self is split into hunter and hunted, and the diction of addiction carries that sense of a body refusing to obey its own warnings. In “When love undergoes a depressive makeover”, we see that boys in pain also love, that they yearn, that their bodies are gunning for affection too, as in the lines, “The aches in our bodies / Are alphabets / In the concordance of affection.” We see this same idea in “Dear Diary,” and “Untitled,” poems that speak about love lost, desire, sex, and the difficulty of navigating them all. These poems complicate the easy picture of the cold Nigerian man. Here, the boy is over feeling, overthinking, and paying for it.

As the book moves into its last movements, the poet turns the light on his own role as performer. In “A Poet Passes in a Punchline” and “We Read Poets for their Blood,” Adetimilehin questions how audiences consume pain. “A poet falls into depression / You say his lines are deep” is a sharp line that exposes how suffering can be praised as craft instead of heard as a plea. “His blood is our ecstasy” and “we blow through / his frail bones” are not gentle images. They cast readers and listeners as vampires. Alongside these come the poems coloured by suicidal thought. “The Seduction of Oblivion” opens with “Some days, / dying is / A tempting offer to those coloured by the blisters of tired feet,” and “Scatter My Bones to the Four Winds” rejects a grave in favour of becoming ash that might “accompany some lonely soul / and maybe, they, will find, my poetry.” Even at his lowest, the speaker cannot quite let go of the hope that someone out there might meet his work and feel less alone. “On Survival” then feels like a hinge. “I would have quenched my own light / If God wouldn’t have asked it of me” shows both surrender and a kind of defiance. Poetry Has All My Pain does not end in complete healing. It ends with someone still on the edge, still breathing, still wondering what to do with all their trauma.

Love Through the Eyes of a Naive Village Boy answers the first collection not by denying darkness but by insisting that softness is still possible. Naive here is not an insult. It is a choice to keep risking tenderness. The “How to Chart the Stars of Naivety” note that opens this second book calls the poems a constellation of feelings and invites the reader to wander. The early piece “Surrender at First Sight” sets the tone: “When I saw you for the first time / My lungs pleaded to surrender their oxygen at your feet.” It is shamelessly dramatic, and that is the joy. The same boy who once wrote about nooses now sounds breathless in a school corridor. The “Songs of an Apprentice” section leans fully into this. In “Love Poem from Biology Class,” biology terms become love language: “To see how my love for you / Multiplies like mitosis,” and “My face becomes a Petri dish / a culture of what happens when / The mitochondria of desire / Invades a cell membrane.” In “Love Poem from Economics Class,” he writes, “I want you like a scarce commodity / My desire for you / Is exempt from diminishing returns” and “In the open market of my heart, / Come build a monopoly.” The jokes work because they come from a believable world: a boy in class, daydreaming his way through subjects.

Other poems are slower and more tender. The letter poems to “M,” like “Letters VII,” hold lines such as “When my hands think of holding, my heart holds on to you” and “The addiction I shall not be rehabilitated from / Is how our fingers lock into one another / the way plugs fit into sockets.” There is ease in that touch, a sharp contrast to the stiffness between father and son earlier. “Liturgy of Bridal Love” takes this further into physical intimacy without losing reverence. “Holding you is a sacred performance. / Every touch, a pigment of scripture / stroked in a psalm, carved in a commandment.” Here, years of church language are turned toward the beloved’s body, which is risky and interesting. The same faith that once condemned his desires is now asked to bless them. Later, in “How to love like a desert,” the speaker gives instructions that are really self-description: love as something careful, scarce, that cannot be demanded, where “only those who knock deeply / should share the love you have.” By the time we reach “Forever Poem,” the tone has matured. He tells M, “You do not complete me / You metamorphose me,” and calls her hugs his “cocoons.” After all the hardness of rock and coffin in the first book, that image of a man willing to be wrapped and changed feels earned.

Taken as a duology, these two books will likely speak most to young adults and older teens, especially Nigerian readers who are negotiating strict homes, difficult faith communities, first loves, depression, and the intense rage of boys who were never taught how to name hurt. The poems matter because they refuse to lie. They show that a boy can be both furious and tender, suicidal and romantic, vulgar and prayerful, sometimes all in the same span of days. If anything, the collection sometimes leans too hard into metaphor, piling image on image where a plain line would be enough. Adetimilehin is not a poet aiming for minimalism. He is spitting on the page in full volume, with all the fire, shame, desire, and gentleness that still live in a “naive village boy” who refuses to die.