If I Gather Here and Shout

“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.”