Onement Won

Following her acclaimed Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma's newest collection, Onement Won, is at once a contemplation and a sharp critique. Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity. Inspired by Barnett Newman's Onement series as well as many texts including the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, Goethe's Faust, and Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, these poems explore the concept of oneness in Hinduism, Abstract Expressionism, and selfhood in an attempt at “onement with lyric certainty,” a way through ideas of prosody to a clearer sense of what is needed in freedom, suffering, and art-making. The result is a stunning work that invokes ancient wisdom into an understanding of self-care that is fiercely anticolonial and anticapitalist, while holding space for suffering as a site of transformation for us individually and collectively.