Rise: An Inspired Book of Dreams

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Johanny Parker

Most poetry collections about hope manage to feel distant from it. They describe it, admire it from a safe angle, and leave you exactly where you started. Rise: An Inspired Book of Dreams does something different and a little harder to explain: it actually transmits something. Ebenezer O. Makinde wrote this book like a man who needed it to exist, and that urgency is felt on nearly every page.

Reading it has a cumulative effect that sneaks up on you. Individually, some poems land softly. But together, moving through the three sections Makinde has shaped around self-discovery, perseverance, and the arrival of dreams, something starts to shift. It's the kind of reading experience where you find yourself slowing down not because the language is difficult but because you want to sit inside a particular line a little longer. There's a specific feeling of being genuinely seen by writing that wasn't written about you, and this collection produces that feeling more than once.

What Makinde is really circling throughout is the gap between the life you're living and the one you can picture for yourself. That gap is where most people quietly give up, and he knows it. He doesn't pretend it's small or easy to cross. The perseverance he writes about doesn't feel like motivation poster language because he lets the weight of the struggle stay in the room alongside the hope. That honesty is what separates this from a hundred other collections with similar intentions.

His style lands somewhere between lyrical and conversational, which is genuinely hard to pull off in poetry. The lines breathe. He doesn't overload his imagery or reach for complexity when clarity will do more work. The three part structure gives the collection a sense of movement, almost like you're being walked somewhere rather than simply read to.

Winning the 2024 Paris Book Festival wasn't accidental. This is the kind of work that earns recognition because it earns trust first.

About The Author

Ebenezer O. Makinde

Ebenezer O. Makinde is the award-winning author of seven books, Reign of Freedom (2019), Light of Darkness (2021), Worth of Diamonds (2023), Hopeland (2023), Cassius King (2023), The Wonderful Attic of Dreams (2024) and the award-winning collection of poetry Rise: An Inspired Book of Dreams.