Septet for the Luminous Ones

"ife's new work...both extends and reframes the transhistorical spatial imagination of their earlier sequence 'porous aftermath,' which listens and bears witness to fugitive spirits, ancestral presences who escape the plantation economy and navigate the bayous of southern Louisiana. ... [It] answers the call of ancestral presences to 'elevate our dead.' 'the new black art is this —' writes ife, 'find the lost soul and love it."—Brian Teare, Kenyon Review, reviewing a previous edition or volume

"Maroon Choreography inspires as possibility for what poetry might be, how it might bring forth homage and critical theory about Blackness in new forms and fresh ways of thought. It disassembles. I'm drawn to books of all sorts that unravel dominant discourses that plague our imaginations, and ife does that."—Dawn Lundy Martin, Brooklyn Poets, reviewing a previous edition or volume

"Spectacularly allusive in its canny, concise segments, sometimes programmatic but more often simply learned, ife's 'tremulous / antegrammatical' work invokes 'the black morning of baldwin / across the river in another country.'"—Stephanie Burt, The New York Times, reviewing a previous edition or volume

"fahima ife's book might be the spark that ignited when Will Alexander's work met Nathaniel Mackey's. Or it grew from a secret overlap between Fred Moten and Alice Notley. In any case, it is on its way 'singing of our soul missive a glowing vortex.' Under pressure, it slips under, around, or through grim history to discover unauthorized pleasure."—Rae Armantrout, author of Finalists

"fahima ife's Septet for the Luminous Ones conjures space for the black queer body, where critical thought, creative practice, and the building of intimate communities blur in radical engagement. These poems are boundless in form and as they expand, they also magnetize, imploring us, 'come on/sense it!' And when we do, we get to be as wild and empathic as ife is in this book. These are jams, rituals, notations, enchantments for those of us who 'want poems that love.'"—Renee Gladman, author of Plans for Sentences