If I Gather Here and Shout - by Funto Omojola (Paperback)

About the Book

"...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."--Publisher description.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"I am so happy to have [If I Gather Here and Shout], to read it and re-read it."
--Drew Zeiba, Document Journal

"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

"Omojola writes through song and swell, rhythmic beats and pulse. . . The poems are rhythmic, propulsive, pushing at and against medical crises and systemic violence across a prose-lyric staggered into clusters, each cluster delineated by the modesty of a single, black page."

--rob mclennan

"In If I Gather Here and Shout, "survival is joy," a frenetic bliss that makes this debut pack an especially smarting punch. Omojola's collection is not simply a declaration of resistance, but a reconfiguration of our relationship to disability and illness that enchants the body and reintroduces music to our souls thrumming for song."
--Turi Sioson, ONLY POEMS

About the Author

Funto Omojola is a poet, performer, and visual artist. They have received fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, and the Poetry Project, and their work has been published in the Boston Review, Pigeon Pages, and Ghost Proposal, among others. If I Gather Here and Shout is Omojola's book.