The Inventory For Lost Things Poetry By Abubakar Ibrahim

The Inventory for Lost Things is a lyrical meditation on memory, grief, exile, and the ways we rebuild ourselves after loss. Through sixty poems that move between personal recollection and collective history, the collection explores how language becomes both wound and wonder, and how tenderness survives in the aftermath of ruin.

The poems traverse intimate and public landscapes, from the quiet ache of familial absence and the ghost of a mother’s voice, to the smouldering ruins of war-torn geographies like Gaza and Khartoum, to the elegies of drowned men and vanished homelands. Each piece in the collection bears witness to displacement, love, and spiritual endurance, drawing from faith, and history to make meaning out of what remains.

The collection is structured as an emotional journey from mourning toward renewal, it begins in silence and ends in light, its final poems gesture toward healing, forgiveness, and the “tenderness of language” as a form of survival. The Inventory for Lost Things invites readers to remember, to grieve, and to rediscover beauty in the broken places of the world.

Abubakar Ibrahim, known popularly by the moniker Imam of Poets, is a Nigerian poet and abstract artist whose work explores identity, memory, grief, displacement, and heritage. He reflects on how individuals perceive themselves, how they are perceived by others, and how these dynamics shape everyday life. His poetry often engages with communal histories, imagination, and sometimes love, navigating the space between the personal and the historical.

He co-authored In the Realm of Dreams, a cross-genre chapbook of poetry and art, with Jide Badmus (available for purchase on Amazon). In 2025, his poem The Only Elegy was shortlisted for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature.