If I Gather Here and Shout

By Funto Omojola

Book Overview

A deft, musical debut poetry collection about the disabling effects of illness, rupture, and inheritance--informed both by Yoruba divinatory systems and violent Western medical understandings of the Black body. If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba divinatory rituals into a hospital room. Incantatory verses accumulate alongside personal and historical "figures" of illness and death to illuminate the tensions between legibility and meaning-making that emerge when an ill Black body is processed through a Western medical context. With intimate knowledge of how ancestral memory aches and sings in the body, Funto Omojola invokes a lamenting chorus in the ceremony of survival.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1643622404
• ISBN13: 9781643622408
• Release Date: November 2024
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.7" x 8.9"