This Is My Life

This Is My Life, first published in 2014, is a book of seventeen poems, each opening with its message in a single line and then making the case in verse. The title poem carries the sentence the others are written from — “This is my life and I will live it” — mine, not yours, and accepted whole: good and bad, fortune and misfortune. The ground is specific: self-belief held without apology, fake friends drawn to whatever looks mysterious, critics who turn into mimics once the flying starts, the people worth remembering, and oppressors who decide who lives and who merely exists.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe writes plainly and in rhyme, and not every poem is him speaking: one is spoken by Death, calling itself the common denominator that makes everyone equal; another watches an author at work from outside; one is an argument with the man in the mirror, who wins it. The poems can be read in any order, and the book settles on a stance rather than a conclusion — climbing your own ladder without looking back down at the steps already left below.