Septet for the Luminous Ones (HC) (2024)

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 beings on Earth through a pulse of Black English.

[sample poem]

preface to a twenty-volume spiritual ascent
neoromanticism
the seven players, and our consorts
i am like a radio, channel of my own