A Review of Oluyele Williams’s “What Life Left In My Hands”
Published in 2026 by i2X Media (First Edition, June 2026).
Reviewer : Femi Morgan

There is a particular kind of silence that follows grief, not the silence of absence, but the silence of survival. It is the silence of a child who buries two foundations and still must learn to stand.

Oluyele Williams knows this silence intimately, and in his debut collection, What Life Left In My Hands, he gives it language. Subtitled Fifteen Spoken-Word Pieces on moments that made me, this slim but weighty volume is less a book of poems than a hand extended across a table, palm open, inviting the reader to touch the scars.

Williams, a project management professional and spoken-word artist who has performed across Nigeria and the UK, has crafted something rare, a memoir in verse that refuses to wallow in its own pain.

The title itself is a declaration. What life left, not what life took. The cover art, depicting cupped, weathered hands holding a drum, a seedling, and coffee beans, perfectly captures the collection’s central tension, the simultaneous holding of inheritance, growth, and the raw materials of survival.

The book opens with “When Hope Knocked,” a meditation on the particular agony of waiting for university admission in Nigeria. Williams captures the weight of JAMB and WAEC not as bureaucratic hurdles but as existential gatekeepers.

“Two names standing between me and the life / I had been rehearsing in my head.”

There is a tenderness here, a recognition that a letter of admission is never just paper, it is a mother’s prayer folded into an envelope, a father’s sacrifice, “a young person’s first glimpse / of a life beyond survival.”

When the University of Ibadan finally accepts him, the joy is hard-won and thoroughly earned. Yet Williams is too wise to let triumph stand alone. He immediately acknowledges the fear waiting at the door, new faces, new expectations, and offers what becomes the collection’s philosophical anchor.

“You do not need to see the whole staircase before celebrating the first step.”

This wisdom, however, is not delivered from a pulpit. It is excavated from the rubble of lived experience. The second piece, “A House Without Roots,” is the collection’s emotional bedrock. Williams’s description of his parents as “the pillars holding up the small sky we called home” gives way to the brutal arithmetic of loss, “One went. Then the other.”

The line “How does a child bury two foundations and return expecting the roof to recognise him?” is devastating in its simplicity, a question that echoes through every subsequent piece. What makes this section remarkable is Williams’s refusal to aestheticize grief.

He does not transform it into something beautiful, he shows it as it is: the instinct to reach for the phone before remembering there is nobody to call, the good news searching for the people who would have celebrated it most. “An empty chair can occupy an entire house,” he writes, and the reader understands that absence is not nothing, it is a presence with weight.

The collection’s middle sections explore betrayal, fear, and the peculiar loneliness of the immigrant experience. “The Snake I Sheltered” recounts a roommate’s treachery with a restraint that makes the wound feel fresh: “While I was building relationships, he was learning their addresses.” Williams resists the temptation to become bitter, offering instead a hard-earned lesson: “Kindness is not a contract. Your honesty cannot guarantee another person’s integrity.”

In “Stolen Yesterdays,” a suitcase theft at Manchester Airport becomes a meditation on the arrogance of taking what belongs to another. And in “When Courage Forgot Me,” a lion’s roar at the University of Ibadan Zoo becomes a lesson in the geography of fear, how the mind builds entire disasters from a single sound.

What elevates this collection above standard memoir is Williams’s skill with the spoken-word form. These pieces are not poems to be read silently, they are meant to be heard, and their rhythms are unmistakable.

In “Crowned by the Climb,” the litany of labour and study,“I worked, then studied. / Studied, then worked,” creates a cadence that mirrors the exhausting repetition of survival.

The short, clipped lines of “Homeless Shadows” convey the dislocation of losing an apartment, a salary, and a family’s shared roof: “The bills did not stop with it. / Rent did not pause. / Hunger did not wait.” There is no decoration here, no ornamentation, just the stark architecture of a life under pressure.

Williams’s greatest gift, however, is his ability to find the universal in the specific. His story is deeply Nigerian, the examination numbers, the family prayers, the particular shame of public beatings at school, but it is also profoundly human.

When he writes in “Fifteen Pounds of Tomorrow” about arriving in Manchester with almost nothing, the reader does not need to have crossed borders to understand the terror of starting over. When he describes his father choosing to spend savings on textbooks rather than security in “My Father’s Invisible Ink,” the reader does not need to have lost a parent to feel the weight of that sacrifice.

The collection’s weakest moments are those where Williams’s didacticism edges into the obvious. Some pieces, particularly “When Courage Forgot Me” and “A Seat Among Stars,” conclude with lessons that feel slightly too neatly packaged wisdom that has been polished smooth rather than left raw.

Yet these moments are few, and they are more than compensated for by the book’s quieter, more complex achievements. “Justice Never Called,” which recounts a lecturer’s refusal to acknowledge a passing script, is a masterclass in restrained fury.

“Seeds in Stranger Soil,” about a school visit that bears fruit six years later, is a testament to the quiet, invisible labour of planting hope.

Ultimately, What Life Left In My Hands is a book about what we do with brokenness. Williams does not pretend to have healed completely; he does not offer easy resolutions or tidy conclusions. Instead, he offers something more valuable: evidence that a life can be shattered and still hold meaning, that grief can coexist with gratitude, that the hands which have lost everything can still cup a seedling and wait for it to grow.

“Sometimes joy is not always the arrival of everything you prayed for,” he writes. “Sometimes, joy is the moment you realize your prayers have not been walking in vain.”

This is not a perfect book. It is occasionally repetitive, and some pieces lack the imagistic richness of the best spoken-word poetry. But it is an honest book, a necessary book, and most importantly, a book that understands the difference between surviving and living.

Oluyele Williams has taken what life left in his hands and shaped it into something that matters. We should all be grateful he chose to share it.

Femi Morgan is an award winning journalist, culture influencer and publisher.