Onement Won - by Prageeta Sharma (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Following her acclaimed Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma's newest collection, Onement Won, is at once a contemplation and a sharp critique. Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships--familial, social, romantic, religious--that have shaped her identity.

Inspired by Barnett Newman's Onement series as well as many texts including the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, Goethe's Faust, and Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, these poems explore the concept of oneness in Hinduism, Abstract Expressionism, and selfhood in an attempt at "onement with lyric certainty," a way through ideas of prosody to a clearer sense of what is needed in freedom, suffering, and art-making. The result is a stunning work that invokes ancient wisdom into an understanding of self-care that is fiercely anticolonial and anticapitalist, while holding space for suffering as a site of transformation for us individually and collectively.

Review Quotes

Previous praise for GRIEF SEQUENCE

"Sharma expands the tradition of lament in verse, as original an experiment in understanding and processing grief as anyone has written... Sharma brilliantly creates memory through her sentence, shattering any grief-cycle that has come before. She has created, artlessly, a theory of sentences."

--Diane Mehta, Electric Lit

"This book doesn't force lessons on its reader, and I'm glad for it. I do believe Sharma gained perspective from the passage of time, but the reader doesn't have to relate to it as a sort of universal experience. This is a book of personal grief, and an account of an individual mourning a specific, sudden, sad loss--a cruel and random one from which she shouldn't be expected to glean a lesson."

--Niina Pollari, Fence Digital

"How does a poet memorialize her beloved without erasing his complexity? Sharma writes candidly of the elegized's personality -- 'your death was as sudden as your rage' -- and of her unanswered anxieties: 'Did he tell the doctor he didn't love me anymore and that's why I wasn't allowed into those conversations?' In doing so, Sharma complicates her narrative away from sentimentality and into reality-fracturing emotionality."

--Emilia Phillips, The New York Times

"There is so much generosity and bravery within each utterance, offering an intimate view of the life adrift."

--Arkansas International

About the Author

Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books 2019), Undergloom, Infamous Landscapes, The Opening Question, which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award, she has taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College in Washington.