Review of “How Do You Sleep at Night”, by John Owen E. Adimike

This poem erupts with immediacy and anger, pulling us into a visceral confrontation with violence, social injustice, and personal anguish. It is not an indictment, a demand for accountability. Its rhetorical force comes from its refrain, “How do you sleep at night”: a question hurled repeatedly like an accusation, forcing the reader into the place of the complicit or indifferent. The poem opens in an almost suffocatingly intimate register. “When your skin feels like warm plastic / clinging to your lungs” is a grotesque, tactile image that creates a sense of being trapped in one’s own body, unable to breathe freely. This imagery recalls both the sensation of anxiety and the lived reality of oppression where survival itself feels artificial, constrained. The following line, “eyes linger at the back of your neck”, intensifies this unease, evoking paranoia, surveillance, the impossibility of rest. By beginning here, the poem grounds the accusation not only in external violence but in the internal atmosphere of constant suffocation.

From there, the voice expands into self-description: “I am a cacophony of chaos / Tangled tightly in the mess that is the world.” This is a powerful declaration of fractured identity, where existence itself is framed as thesis, as argument, as something always under scrutiny. The lines “Every hobby demands explanations / With my palette expanding and accommodating a myriad of flavors” suggest a life of constant justification, where even personal pleasures and cultural tastes are politicized or interrogated. The layering here conveys exhaustion as well as defiance: the sense that identity is endlessly questioned, distorted, and forced into narrow boxes.

The poem’s second movement shifts outward into social critique. The repetition of the refrain becomes sharper: “How do you sleep at night / When pink roses are snatched up / Everyday.” The roses here seem to symbolize innocence, beauty, perhaps young lives violently taken. The stanza then erupts with a litany of violence: bullets answering “no,” pepper spray deployed as a weapon, bruises painted by palms, tongues spreading lies, men asserting ownership over women’s bodies. This catalogue of injustices is urgent and relentless, layering the different forms of violence women, protesters, and marginalized bodies face in the public and private sphere. It is one of the most potent passages in the poem, and its blunt naming of brutality leaves little room for comfort.

The closing stanza turns global and devastating. The image of children hiding from explosions instead of doing homework starkly contrasts innocence with horror, emphasizing how war robs children not only of safety but of ordinary life. “Dreams lay burnt in the air / Heavy and tired / Snuffed out before leaving the soil of flesh” gives the poem its most tragic line, where hope itself is extinguished before it has a chance to grow. The metaphor of dreams as fragile lives, suffocated before they bloom, lingers painfully in the mind and makes the refrain echo even more accusingly.

What this poem achieves is intensity and direct moral force. Its energy is that of a protest poem, a work of resistance that refuses lyrical prettiness in favor of sharp images, harsh juxtapositions, and relentless questioning. It does not offer resolution because its purpose is not to soothe but to disturb, to implicate, to force reckoning. The refrain functions as both structure and accusation, keeping the reader unsettled, reminding them that comfort is itself complicit.

If there is an area for refinement, it lies in rhythm and phrasing. Some lines, like “My existence- the thesis of every topic / Spawned narrowly into bitter withdrawals,” feel conceptually heavy but rhythmically dense, and they risk losing the sharpness of imagery in abstraction. Tightening such lines could make the poem hit even harder. Similarly, small adjustments to enjambment could sharpen the pacing, letting certain images, like “pepper spray is more of a weapon”, land with fuller weight.

Still, the poem’s rawness is part of its power. I think it feels like it was written as a refusal to remain silent in the face of violence. Its voice is unflinching, its images visceral, its structure insistent. It is the kind of poem meant less for quiet reading and more for performance, where the repetition of the refrain and the rising fury of each stanza could fill a room, demanding not admiration but response.