If I Gather Here and Shout

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.

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: Funto Omojola
• | Publisher: Nightboat Books
• | Publication Date: Jan 09, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781643622408
• | ISBN-10: 1643622404