OMOJOLA, Funto
If I Gather Here and Shout

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. [publishers’ note]

“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

Published by Nightboat, 2024
Poetry