One for busybodiesOne for frying chickens aliveOne for crying aloud in the night at the beginning of night watchesOne for eating sweets with riceOne for butterfly collecting—god, what an evil hobby—gassing living things to itemize in your hovel in EnglandOne borderlineOne-bedroom disaster mansionOne black hole & bad experimentOne romantic Wow! after anotherOne forest becomes abundantly fellOne millihelen, the quantum of beauty required to launch One warshipOne snatches us from fairgrounds, wriggling, out…One sifts you into aerosol… a spray of rose oil pretty as powder adrift within waves of radio waterOne downgrades bodies to zero status & wakes up whistling DixieOne is a killing jar— even calls itself thatOne of One desire— eat every animal in God’s Good Claymation
Feature Date
- December 9, 2024
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
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“One Hell” from Mass for Shut-Ins by Mary-Alice Daniel.
Published by Yale University Press in March 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Mary-Alice Daniel.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and currently turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a scholar at Princeton University.
New Haven, Connecticut
Yale University
The 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, in which Mary-Alice Daniel confronts tricontinental culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds.
“Against humans creating hell on earth, Daniel draws on animistic, Islamic, and syncretic Christian traditions from her native Nigeria to unleash potent incantations, rituals and spells, electric as St. Elmo’s fire. Buckle up.”—Rae Armantrout, judge
In Mass for Shut-Ins, African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals originate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, poems map speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It animates an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy—these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime.
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