About the book
A woman stretches her hand through a border fence. A man on a station platform nearly falls onto the track because he heard his mother tongue spoken behind him in a foreign land. In a park, the smell of woodsmoke returns a village whole.
Fermented Memories is a book about what survives the crossing. Moving between the places we leave and where we arrive, between the languages we inherit and those we acquire, these poems follow the migrant past the border and the paperwork into the questions that outlast them: what happens to the self when home is elsewhere, and can a new place, in time, become one?
Priscilla Okoye writes in English braided with Igbo, in a voice that is communal, unhurried and unsparing.
Currently available directly in the UK through Iska Press while wider distribution is being arranged.
Launch offer: free UK shipping through 4 October.
Book details
Contributors
Author in focus
Forthcoming exhibition
Priscilla Okoye's work A Village Made Naked is included in Between Homes: Redefining Migration, an exhibition at First Floor Galleries, UCL East, 7 Sidings Street, London E20 2AE, 16 September – 1 October 2026. Free admission.
Made possible through a UCL Knowledge Exchange grant, the exhibition was developed in collaboration with Migrants’ Rights Network and Yarrow Films, bringing together short creative works by migrant community advisors across film, photography, sound and writing.
A Village Made Naked is a poetic reflection on migration, memory and belonging. Through poetry, image and sound, the work follows a journey from an emptied Nigerian village to an English landscape where the sounds, smells and rhythms of home return through memory. The land grieves for those who left, while those who left carry their own longing with them. What begins as an elegy for what has been left behind becomes a discovery: “I’ve lost nothing, because I carry my whole village with me.”
Iska Press is sharing the author’s exhibition and is not its organiser.
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