Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Leaked Footages is, simply put, a disquieting mirror held up to our fractured present. The primary achievement of the collection, and so where I locate its ambitiousness, lies in its uncanny and audacious embrace of this contemporary digital deluge, especially by transforming the very mechanisms of modern information dissemination like the viral video, the newsfeed, and the leaked file into a potent poetic language. For example, in “Rhubarb Shot,” the mechanism of information dissemination is the “radio show” report and he embeds the report within the poem:

on a radio show, a woman calls in to report a missing daughter. left home for school at seven. last seen on a school bus. fourteen. light skinned. hair covered in hijab. skirt, large enough to fit two girls her size. has memorized the Qur’an. fluent in hausa & pidgin & arabic & english. speaks like her lineage lives on her tongue. smells of seawater.

The factual, though journalistically rendered, details about the missing girl (“fourteen. light skinned. hair covered in hijab.”) mimic the concise, often stark presentation of information in a newsfeed or report. Sadiq then elevates these details into potent poetic language with evocative imagery like “smells of seawater,” which transforms the missing girl from a statistic into a breathing presence. In addition, even some of the titles in the collection, particularly the recurring “uncensoreds” in “Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg in an IDPs Camp” and “Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg at a Shooting Practice,” functioning as thematic markers, signal a raw, quite unfiltered engagement with difficult realities. These titles, also reminiscent of news headlines or the kind of captions attached to viral videos on YouTube and similar platforms, reinforce the collection’s central conceit that we are witnessing unvarnished truths, however uncomfortable.

Leaked Footages is a work that reflects our anxieties and actively interrogates the ways in which we consume and internalize the bleak realities to which they serve as mere natural effects or consequences. The poems in the book force in us a reckoning with the footage we are all, in some measure, leaking into, and receiving from, the world.

‍