Chapter 8 Stylistic foregrounding in Christian Otobotekere's Live 2 lives - Maledo Richard Oliseyenum Introduction This chapter focuses on some stylistic foregrounding devices used by Christian Otobotekere in selected poems in his poetry collection Live 2 Lives (2009). Stylistic foregrounding refers to the linguistic highlighting of features of a text for aesthetic, communicative and meaning making purposes. Our attention will be focused on some graphological features and nominal group modifications in the selected poems following the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammatical model. It is discovered that Otobotekere uses some visual designs (graphology) to draw the reader's attention to significant features of his poems and noun head modifications deliberately to foreground features of the head nouns to make them prominent to the readers and communicate the desired meaning. Christian Otobotekere's collection of poems, Live 2 Lives (2009), contains 47 poems set in the modern day Nigerian society with all its attendant imperfections. According to Akobo, in these poems the poet "presents the cluster as a curative balm for the ills of today and as a preventive therapy against tomorrow" (x).Thus as an artist, Otobotekere is conscious of his society, his environment and he brings these to bear in the content of the poems in this collection. The poems with their high musical and alluring tunes are also highly instructive and didactic. A reading of "Quit It All" (82) proves this with its lamenting tune and the underlying didactic message. · As its thematic thrust, Otobotekere's poems in the collection navigate around corruption, deprivation, exploitation, neo-colonialism, environmental devastation, economic woes, political, religious and other social ills in the present Nigerian society. In most of the poems the poet sees himself as an activist questioning why things are the way they are, while in others his didactic voice in the denunciation of the perceived ills in the society is prominent. In some we see