Mass for Shut-Ins: (117 Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Mass for Shut-Ins is a dreamwork distilling the conflicting cultures, languages, and religions that have made Mary-Alice Daniel the writer she is

“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

Mary-Alice Daniel is a poet of place. Venturing through landscapes, dreamscapes, and hellscapes, the poems in Mass for Shut-Ins express controlled chaos. They perform cultural excavations and conduct unexpected experiments reflecting idiosyncratic identity. Daniel confronts a tricontinental heritage, engaging the mythos of her nomadic Fulani tribe alongside the Evangelical propaganda and American mass media she was raised on. Charged by a collision of influences, fevered images map an estranged native Nigeria onto an adopted, uneasy America.

Animated by African and Western mythic traditions, her poetry conceives an original cosmology. As she investigates her curious placement in many worlds, straying into invisible fields of spiritual warfare, her poems naturally encounter supernatural systems. Wayward spirits haunt an utterly odd universe marked by superstition and the speculative—where it is always nighttime. The poet invites the unreal inside. Her voice is a vortex, a force pulling together something unconventional, otherworldly, intrusively ominous. This collection was selected by award-winning poet Rae Armantrout to become the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

About the Author :
Mary-Alice Daniel was born in northern Nigeria and raised in England and Tennessee. She holds a PhD from the University of Southern California. She is the author of A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents. Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.

Review :
Gold Medal winner in the poetry category for the 93rd Annual California Book Awards, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

“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

“Mass for Shut-Ins is a ground-breaking, earth-shaking collection by a poet possessed of uncanny powers. Every poem, every line, is wildly original yet loyal to the art form’s mysterious, sacred origins. This is a book to which readers will return throughout their lives, and that will also, surely, awe readers yet to be born.”—Laura Kasischke, author of Where Now

“Brilliant and astonishing, unfolding as a sequence of epistles from the checkpoints at various borders of hell. At times, these psalms of passage seem to have been sent from a soothsayer in some future world.”—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

“Mass for Shut-Ins challenges and delights through lived rituals flowing together. Multiple worlds move with a lyrical jest of fantastic leaping where a personal surrealism manifests.”—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

“The fevered brilliance of Mary-Alice Daniel’s poems—rich with improvisations, tabu-breaking transgressions, and elegant lines of beautifully managed verse—sets her apart as one of the truly exciting new voices in poetry.”—Kwame Dawes, author of UnHistory
 
“Busts toppled, artifacts cracked, perfected by ruin, every bump and nudge premeditated as the poet dervishes through the Museum of World Culture, her one exhibit, to create Mass for Shut-Ins.”—Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest