Love Is Not to Be Sold is a bold and unfiltered collection of poems tracing the emotional evolution of a man in motion — from the hunger of first love to the bruises of betrayal, from youthful desire to spiritual reckoning.
Originally published as Enigma: Beyond the Poet, this revised and expanded edition gathers over two decades of writing shaped by memory, lust, faith, anger, politics, and self-interrogation.
Across its seven major movements — from From Cupid’s Will to The Long Reckoning — James Amuta confronts romance, sexual vulnerability, moral contradiction, Nigerian social decay, aging, loss, and the fragile architecture of identity. These poems are not decorative meditations. They are confessions. Arguments. Autopsies of love and ego.
At times sensual, at times furious, at times devastatingly introspective, the collection exposes the distance between who we perform and who we truly are.
This is poetry that refuses to be polite.
This is poetry that remembers.
This is poetry that insists that love — real love — cannot be bought, auctioned, traded, or faked.
It must endure.
