ife, fahima: Septet for the Luminous Ones (HB)

Wesleyan University Press, hardcover

Publication Date: February 6, 2024

Publisher Marketing: A Black poet performs a shamanic soul retrieval of the seven-hundred-year-old diasporic black arts tradition

Continuing her search for a neotropical mythos, in this brilliant second collection poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction. Spoken in quiet recognition and grounded in desire, Septet for the Luminous Ones imagines a lush soundscape textured in oblique spiritual fusion of the Taíno and Yoruba. Or, what it sounded like coming together for the first time, and what it sounds like ever after--breathless, diaspora calling. Similar to the incidents in Maroon Choreography, what resounds in these poems is an ecstatic love song of the Caribbean Americas, of the main lands and islands, shaped and reshaped as breathwork, ritual, communion, and fantasy. In essence, the collection speaks to raise the vibrational frequencies of all species on Earth through a sensual pulse of Black English.

From Alchemical Sirens

it flickers in
balsamic appeal

moist in the palms of our hands
a psalm a lamp a sap in our laps

an asp

plausible love song after love poems
were last put on hold

as in b l a ck a r t
the new black art is this --

find the lost soul and love it