If I Gather Here and Shout

Join us for a very special poetry event in the Flow Chart Space!

Poets Samiya Bashir and Funto Omojola will read from their work, then join in conversation, on the occasion of Nightboat Books publishing 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.” Just out on Novmber 11th.

A reception will follow.

Samiya Bashir is a multi-media poet, writer, librettist, and artist whose solo and collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, exhibited, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Bashir lives in Harlem, NYC.

Funto Omojola is a Nigerian-American poet and artist based in New York State. They’ve received fellowships from MacDowell, the Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Arts, and the Poetry Project, among others and their work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pigeon Pages, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. If I Gather Here and Shout is their first book.

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Praise for If I Gather Here and Shout:

“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

“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.”

-Sawako Nakayasu

“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.”

-Roberto Tejada

“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.”

-Rosamond S. King