Sacrament of Bodies

by Romeo Oriogun

Overview

2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist 

In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival through migration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496220967
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	03/01/2020
Series:	African Poetry Book
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	90
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Romeo Oriogun was born in Lagos, Nigeria. He is the author of the chapbooks Burnt Men, The Origin of Butterflies, and Museum of Silence. He was the winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Prize and has received fellowships from Harvard University’s English Department, the IIE-Artist Protection Fund, Oregon Institute for Creative Research, and the Hutchins Institute of African and African American Research. He lives in Iowa, where he is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
 

Table of Contents

Before Your Mama Knew Us as Light    
The Ritual of Giving a Body Its Name    
Cathedral of a Broken Body    
Departure    
Kumbaya    
Saddest Night Alive    
Elegy for a Burnt Friend    
Coming Out    
How to Survive the Fire    
At Udi    
Denial    
The Guilt of Exile    
To the Man Who Mocked My Scared Body    
Boy    
Pink Club    
Before You Leave    
The Birthday    
A Viral Picture    
Satan Be Gone    
What We Do Not Want    
The Lost Chapter of the Bible Written After God Stopped Receiving the Smoke of Burnt Flesh    
Elegua    
The Queer Boy Remembers Colonization    
Sacrament of Bodies    
I Do Not Want My Body to Fly    
My Body Is No Miracle    
My Tinder Date Speak of Fruits    
A Reversed Epithalamium or What Didn’t See the Light    
Heaven Is a Back Alley without God    
Goodbye    
Exile    
Battle of the Rams    
Finding Home    
What the World Won’t Show Us    
On Forgetting    
Everything Must Die    
On the 23rd Death Anniversary of My Father    
Prelude to Freedom    
Sermon of Pain    
Meeting My Mother through Death    
After a Blackout    
Acknowledgments    

Editorial Reviews

“Sacrament of Bodies is a very special book. But why? Because Romeo Oriogun has developed a style that is both personal and mythical, because these poems are sensual and spiritual at once, because they give us both a story and a song, a shout and a whisper. ‘I have learnt to love every broken thing,’ Oriogun tells us. I find that Oriogun’s tension between the high style of a sermon and the earthiness of love songs gives these poems a particularly memorable touch. It is memorable also because it is able to give us a journey (through time, through forgetting, through elegy, through exile) that is both a story of a real man in real time and an incantation, a speaking in tongues. But it is his music that finally sways me, it’s music that lifts it all, that makes out of truth-telling a song. The music works here because Oriogun is a master of incantation: ‘I danced,’ he tells us, ‘as if I knew every song had a door.’ Indeed. I love this beautiful, heart-wrenching, passionate book.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
 

Ilya Kaminsky

“Sacrament of Bodies is a gorgeous book filled with fiery pain and ecstatic desire. These poems are spacious enough to hold all the contradictions: the violence waged against gay people and the body’s insistence on love, the tenderness of flesh and the carnage of war, remembering and forgetting, silence and song. Romeo Oriogun has wrought complex, elegant poems that wrench beauty from all that would kill us. As he writes, ‘I worship the day because it survived the night.’ I admire these poems immensely. They make me stronger.”—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo and Like a Beggar
 

Ellen Bass