Jabez Incarnate

Jabez Incarnate is the debut poetry pamphlet from Nigerian-British artist Joladé Olusanya. Written in the wake of spiritual reckoning and personal transition, the collection explores the burdens of inheritance, masculinity, faith, memory, and belonging.

Olusanya’s poems travel between London, Lagos, and New York, where familial duty and the weight of culture clash and harmonise. Rooted in the language of the everyday and the epic, Jabez Incarnate is a sustained meditation on lineage, distance, and what it means to carry names, promises and absences.

Through striking lyricism and cinematic frames, Olusanya captures moments of soft resistance – men at barbershops, prayer in public, grief on public transport – evoking a sense of a person trying to navigate who he is, and who he must become.