local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor

Chiagoziem Jideofor’s debut collection, local remedies, dismantles colonial histories and reshapes them. Exploring Igbo stories through memory, myth, and strangeness, Jideofor testifies to the nonlinear experience of trauma. What does it mean to process trauma as the child of parents who survived a war, a genocide? How do inherited wounds emerge unexpectedly in the body, in the mind, in a family? In local remedies, histories are refracted, and like sun through rain, these poems scatter a different light—one which illuminates our shared need for remedies, both old and new. 

Humorous and wise, the poet is a sojourner speaking in a voice that reverberates with the intensity and resilience of many voices. Here, sovereignty does not belong to the individual, but to the collective, which sings “reviving hymns” while acknowledging the deepest communal pain points, inviting us to share in this humanity. 

In Igbo culture, names are given as symbols, as prophecies, as charms spoken to reverse the family curse. In naming this collection, Jideofor speaks into existence an antidote to colonial paradigms, which stigmatize being “local” or “from the village” as unsophisticated, naïve. Instead, she crowns this moniker with “remedies,” bestowing it with the regenerative magic of food and water, of family gathered and names given, reaffirming the sacredness of every local remedy that has been lost.  

A traditional prayer invokes: May what has the color of gold happen for us. And local remedies helps us to see that gold is the color of what grows when together, we laugh, sow, and grieve, “raising songs and prayers / on account of the seed.”

With an introduction by poet and educator Kwoya Fagin Maples.

local remedies officially launches & ships on April 14th, 2026
The first 100 pre-orders will receive limited-edition ephemera.

In poetic quests to name the elusive, Chiagoziem Jideofor’s remarkable local remedies makes “inquiry into patterns” and tallies the cost of such efforts across “the unassuming fields of [her] childhood” and in material mined from lore and national histories. Her poems wear their burdens with grace, content to linger on non-absolutes as fodder for their conjuring acts. I am grateful for this poet and the worlds to which her poems and imagination call us. — ‘Gbenga Adeoba, author of Exodus

local remedies is a collection attentive to the inheritances we carry—in our bodies, our languages, and our histories. Moving through memory, war, migration, grief, and the intimacies of kinship, these poems ask what remains when a people survive devastation, and what must be remembered to keep surviving. Here, the domestic is porous with myth; mothering is both wound and shelter; hunger becomes archive. The speaker moves between the world before and the world after, tracing how lineage impresses itself on gesture, appetite, speech, and silence. Across poems that are tender, exacting, and unafraid of difficult looking, local remedies refuses the flatness of singular narrative. Instead, it gathers fragments, oral histories, household rituals, improvised cures, and the small acts of making-do that hold a life together. The result is a vivid and expansive meditation on what we salvage, what we are made of, and the many ways the past continues to beat inside the present. In this work, survival is not merely endurance—it is an ongoing, communal project of naming, tending, stitching, and returning. — Sarah Lubala, author of A History of Disappearance

Like the moringa miracle tree, local remedies is a vital cure that Jideofor offers her readers. After reading this unforgettable debut you will share this wish I have for Chiagoziem Jideofor: rain, and the sight of white egrets, afterwards.   — Kwoya Fagin Maples, author of MEND

Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s adda, the minnesota review, Shō Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

✦ Select Online Publications ✦

POETRY, “Wild” & “Self-Preservation”

Passages North “Mythmaking”

Shō “a name, a condition”

Poetry Daily “local remedies”

Michigan Quarterly Review, “wild persimmons”

20.35 Africa, “Self-Portrait as Bone in Three Lives”

106 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-6-7
LCCN: 2025945292
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