Septet for the Luminous Ones

i wanted us to sing and dance
a mycological whirl

to enter it holographic

and make it rain

The speaker of fahima ife’s opening poem, “Entheogenic Rush,” evokes the expansive “mycological whirl” of the varied rituals and traditions that resonate throughout Septet for the Luminous Ones. Bodily and conceptual, “in the loam and / not quite yet astral,” these poems move through breath and altered states, mining the “astral deep” of longing.

ife’s language ranges from the sensual and the sensory to “virtual reality.” Nature and the present future of technologies merge: “being wind it says / is like having a / holosensual experience.” The poem “intensive care unit,” ends: “a child // a child // is glitching.” Amid the whirling transcendence of short-lined fragments are moments of expansion. The prose poem “recession” begins in a dentist’s chair and moves into “the bullshit nature of corporate capitalism and western medicine and how working in these institutions is killing us at the tooth and bone,” ultimately concluding:

we cannot fathom the maximalism necessary to even carry our ancient vessels through a single day and we are somehow going through the motions the whirl of it spinning us the crumbling of the seventh mode of granite civilization of my jaw the crumbling it down as scales and the scales of labor at the economy and at the gumline a recession in seventy-seven parts

The path to transcendence of this “granite civilization” is cosmic, is musical, is creation. This is not a work of solitary practice. ife invokes poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks (“the seven players, and our consorts,”) and Robin Coste Lewis (“voyage of a sable poetics”), as well as various composers and performers. The soundtrack to these poems’ creation is marked in the end “notes and discography,” which includes Vega Trails’s Tremors in the Static and American Jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders playing with the London Symphony Orchestra.

The book’s final poem, “black art is loud as a skunk at midnight,” concludes with sound, with a vision beyond this world:

            a star
            a star
            oom boom
            ba boom