Cover Design: Rissa Hochberger & Abimbola Omojola
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.
Date: November 2024
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Format: Print
Genre: Poetry
Order now from Nightboat Books
Reviews
I read a lot of [If I Gather Here and Shout] as prayers and spells. . . flowing in and out through time, which is very beautiful to see.
A ritual, an invocation, a reclamation of narrative that draws from Yoruba traditions and interrogates the brutal legacies of Western medical practice. . . incantatory.
If I Gather Here and Shout gives us the beauty and terror that resist scientific objectivity, the “birth-body” morphing to evade all forms of capture. In a cosmology that perceives the living, dead, and unborn as a single unit, these poems show me that illness is only the universe seeking karmic equilibrium.
Date: November 2024
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Format: Print
Genre: Poetry
Order now from Nightboat Books
Reviews
I read a lot of [If I Gather Here and Shout] as prayers and spells. . . flowing in and out through time, which is very beautiful to see.
-Precious Okoyomon, Elephant
A ritual, an invocation, a reclamation of narrative that draws from Yoruba traditions and interrogates the brutal legacies of Western medical practice. . . incantatory.
-Kristen Kubečka, BOMB
If I Gather Here and Shout gives us the beauty and terror that resist scientific objectivity, the “birth-body” morphing to evade all forms of capture. In a cosmology that perceives the living, dead, and unborn as a single unit, these poems show me that illness is only the universe seeking karmic equilibrium.
-Angie Sijun Lou, The Whitney Review
PRAISE
“Funto Omojola’s If I Gather Here and Shout is a startling, sculptural figuration of a wrenched body of “guts” “wounded wash,” “tubes,” “injection,” “hollow organ,” and “sac.” A myth making, a prayer ritual, a study of Yoruba symbology as the body remakes itself into monstrous capacity, yearning and yielding its poetics of drumming libretto. Omojola’s If I Gather Here and Shout is a fierce debut that worms its way right under the skin.”
“In Funto Omojola’s If I Gather Here and Shout, joy and resistance and beauty show up in full force against the harsh light of systemic and medical forms of violence. With its rhythmically delicious syntax, it summons a new articulation of the emotional registers of rupture – it limns the language-music continuum, ultimately broadening our capacity to choreograph survival through art.”
“Feverish and palpitating over ritual ground ascend the intonations here that summon elders, twin daughters, and priests who, with spit and marrow, break the spell of history’s brutal vestiges.
Bespoken, as if by Ifá divination, an ancestor village is delivered from the underworld syllables of stone and seed, for the counterpoint sake of the poet’s own birth-body and resounding victory—“ceremony is survival, survival is joy.” This hallowed song: a revelation.”
“This collection, an authoritative meditation on human interactions with spirit and machine is itself a talking drum reminding us that everything is ceremony, including our bodies. Indeed, the body’s ill wellness and well illness—the “birth-body,” the “non dead-ing body,” the “premonition-ing body”. . . the body in its material wholeness of flesh, bowels, hair, marrow…its bodily functions of swallowing, birthing, rotting, drooling; and fallible and malleable gender—are all pulsing on these pages. Reader, in Omojola’s world, you become part of We, village, where the past and future meet and coexist in our present. We are all inquirers, driven by this urgent and contemplative book to continue to explore, because survival is joy.”
“Funto Omojola’s If I Gather Here and Shout is a startling, sculptural figuration of a wrenched body of “guts” “wounded wash,” “tubes,” “injection,” “hollow organ,” and “sac.” A myth making, a prayer ritual, a study of Yoruba symbology as the body remakes itself into monstrous capacity, yearning and yielding its poetics of drumming libretto. Omojola’s If I Gather Here and Shout is a fierce debut that worms its way right under the skin.”
-Dawn Lundy Martin
“In Funto Omojola’s If I Gather Here and Shout, joy and resistance and beauty show up in full force against the harsh light of systemic and medical forms of violence. With its rhythmically delicious syntax, it summons a new articulation of the emotional registers of rupture – it limns the language-music continuum, ultimately broadening our capacity to choreograph survival through art.”
-Sawako Nakayasu
“Feverish and palpitating over ritual ground ascend the intonations here that summon elders, twin daughters, and priests who, with spit and marrow, break the spell of history’s brutal vestiges.
Bespoken, as if by Ifá divination, an ancestor village is delivered from the underworld syllables of stone and seed, for the counterpoint sake of the poet’s own birth-body and resounding victory—“ceremony is survival, survival is joy.” This hallowed song: a revelation.”
-Roberto Tejada
“This collection, an authoritative meditation on human interactions with spirit and machine is itself a talking drum reminding us that everything is ceremony, including our bodies. Indeed, the body’s ill wellness and well illness—the “birth-body,” the “non dead-ing body,” the “premonition-ing body”. . . the body in its material wholeness of flesh, bowels, hair, marrow…its bodily functions of swallowing, birthing, rotting, drooling; and fallible and malleable gender—are all pulsing on these pages. Reader, in Omojola’s world, you become part of We, village, where the past and future meet and coexist in our present. We are all inquirers, driven by this urgent and contemplative book to continue to explore, because survival is joy.”
-Rosamond S. King