If I Gather Here and Shout - Paperback

by Funto Omojola (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Funto Omojola is a poet, performer, and visual artist. They have done projects with Dia Chelsea, the Poetry Project, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and their work has been supported by A.I.R Gallery, Cave Canem Foundation, MASS MoCA and Millay Arts. Omojola's first book is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2024. They live in New York.