Bhion Achimba, from Winter with Ovid
Poet-scholar Bhion Achimba will be collaborating with Eos on a series of events throughout 2025-26 that celebrate contemporary Black poets who reanimate ancient Greek and Roman figures, images, and myths in their writing. To kick off this collaboration, the Executive Committee wanted to celebrate Achimba’s poetry by offering members an intimate introduction to his collection-in-progress.
Winter with Ovid reimagines the ancient Roman poet banished to Tomis, in modern day Romania, as a person seeking political asylum in the United States. In these poems, Achimba draws on his experience relocating to the United States in order to escape the anti-gay laws of his native Nigeria. Achimba simultaneously challenges his readership to plumb the underexplored depths of Ovid’s writing from the exile imposed upon him by Augustus, the first Roman princeps (often translated as emperor), and to confront contemporary facets of forced displacement.
This exploration yields discomfortingly evocative insights on routine acts of dehumanization and the reinvigorating force of wonder.
Achimba has chosen to read a pair of poems from Winter with Ovid initially published by The Brooklyn Rail to share with Eos and in anticipation of the READS session dedicated to Rita Love’s Mother Love he will lead at the 2026 SCS annual meeting.
Enjoy the readings below and look out for updates about this collaboration throughout the year!
OVID AT ARRIVALS
A country is a
thrush you can touch but—
& I mean this— rarely ever twice.
All that blue
glimpsed then taken in from an
airplane window.
His suitcase is
the weight of unroofed &
weathered walls—reed-bricks,
quarried cobbles. Ovid lugs it across
blunt & well-worn
tarmac. His thoughts traverse
the old routes again & again: the wrecked boat, belly up
beside the breakwaters
hollowed out like a storm-stunted
chapel; the oarsmen still latched
to their craft, nailing together the insufferable
planks. But that was
many miles away, many centuries ago.
Behind him now, American airbuses
alight, take off
from the crowded vestibule
but each one
from & to where? At the
immigration counter,
he tilts his body
like an empty
bottle of arrack.
The amber-eyed
officers & their
panther dogs rummage
carefully inside
his name.
THE DETENTION OF OVID
Startled awake inside the ICE
detention center—his
mind roiled in its bone pod,
then thawed
unevenly.
Morning careened
in like a jalopy.
Ovid padded his inaugural words
with yesterday’s slime,
with ten-years-
worth of traveler’s fatigue,
with gossamer thread:
i / mere body/
you/ American/
Sunlight flooded
the room’s threshold
like a rush of
orange urine.
Bird shrieks—
maybe the cry of children
in the immediate vicinity?
Once more, he was
passed through
the metal detectors.
Nothing came up
—nothing. Still the
adamant screen
sputtered & blinked, cameras
in their static burr.
Ciphering wires, they coiled
like centipedes
out of the third
& fourth walls.
Born in rural southeastern Nigeria, Bhion Achimba is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and a Research Associate in Classics at Brown University. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Frontier Poetry, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine. Awarded the 2023 Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation, he is completing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.