Onement Won

By Prageeta Sharma

• Description
• Reviews

• 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.

• In Prageeta Sharma’s new poetry collection Onement Won, loss is a roiling, a tearing open, or as Sharma says, a wound.... And rather than presenting grief as a tidy “process” that the griever moves through and then out of, Onement Won discloses a whole new self appearing in place of the old one—or torn out of that old one and placed alongside her.
  Katie Berta, LARB
  
  Across such long and languid sentences that extend the page in sequence, and poems that extend across distances and into each other, Sharma writes through and around grief, and what might follow; what might emerge from such a heft of death and loss and ash. Sharma composes lyric meditations on grief and beyond grief, writing lost friendships and navigating such strange, foreign and familiar territories.
  Rob Mclennan's blog
  
  Onement Won by Prageeta Sharma  is a woven text, inviting to threads and echoes. As with her first book, there is more than one kind, or level, of loss in each poem: a difficult friendship’s end, places, desires of youth, the secrets in a dead person’s left behind items, attachments to philosophy, a stepmother’s role, the beloved partner. At the heart of the book, grief lives in language and imagination even as it is fated to be untranslatable: “I found both abstraction and pain” and “Abstraction helps me think about concrete things.”
  Cindy Juyoung Ok, Poetry Northwest