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Author:   Romeo Oriogun
Publisher:   University of Nebraska Press
Imprint:   University of Nebraska Press
ISBN:  

9781496234032

ISBN 10:   1496234030
Pages:   144
Publication Date:   01 October 2023
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments I. Departure It Begins with Love Ballet in the Cold A Letter from the Village of Trees Night Songs Cotonou The Wild Mystic Wishbone Ouidah Late December in Abidjan The World Demands from Us Our Existence A Little Cartography of Violence Nadoba Crossing into Togo The Sea Dreams of Us Wind Whisperer A Village Life There Is No End Here On the Road to Paradise The Abandoned Church Camp Welcome Migrant by the Sea The Drowned On Leaving At the Bus Park in Bamako This Way to Water Migrant at the Sahara Someday the Desert Will Sing Ait-Ben-Haddou A Train Stop in the Sahara At the Edge of the Desert Mist The Gallery at the End of Time II. Remembrance From Darkness into Light In the Middle of August, I Saw the Sky A Stranger in Aba Last Days of General Abacha Remembrance Under the Mango Tree Harmattan The River Is by the Door Falling Dusk At Midnight I Dreamt of Rapture Before the Arrival of Rain The Gathering of Bastards Waiting for Rain At Lagos Polo Club III. Wanderer Assimilation Asylee in the Evening of the World The Migrant of Padua O Blue Waters, O Ships! In the Museum of Fine Arts, I Remembered Home All Winter I Had No Love Walking along Harvard Square Flyway Atlantic Beach On Belonging San Juan A Man of Good Fortune Before Nightfall Solstice A Phone Call from Exile Nomad Full Moon Isla Verde Lamentation Offerings Ode to Shadows Echoes The Revolution Is Over Returnee Salute from the Boston Cold

Reviews

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 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

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 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

Author Information

Romeo Oriogun was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and now lives in Iowa. He is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (Nebraska, 2020) and Nomad.  

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