Overview

This is not just a book about the body but a profound exploration of what it means to inhabit one. In Agatha, Lex Orgera masterfully weaves a tapestry of poems that delve into the myriad ways a body navigates the world-through selfhood, autonomy, and the inherent fragility of our human form. ""Make your body mean // juggling, make it jump from an altar,"" Orgera writes, inviting readers to journey through the complex landscape of existence. From the innocence of good girls to the sanctity of martyred saints, from revolutionary fervor to the eerie sensation of disembodiment, these poems offer a poignant portrait of Saint Agatha's story, told through her own eyes. Orgera's work interrogates the vernacular of the marketplace, challenges the lofty ""powers that be"" in their office chairs, and probes the disorientation of a brain shaken by concussion. The poems traverse the rugged terrain of visceral, linguistic, and spiritual experiences, creating a vivid and immersive narrative. Interspersed within this intricate braid are elegies for deceased poets and distant friends, odes to the resonant power of sound-clinking teeth, clacking bones, the wind whipping along a shoreline-alongside incantations, erasures, and urgent lists. Themes of space travel, lineage, and reincarnation add to the richness of this evocative collection. Agatha is a collection that speaks to both the personal and the universal. It implicates us, invites us, and ultimately immerses us in a world where ""our collective body huddles against the fire, then steps back // into the fire."" This is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the profound depths of human experience.

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9781956907209

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Reviews

For a long time now, I have wanted to start a convent, and now that Agatha is here, I can. Agatha will be our book of days. Our book of revelations. Our boob shop almanac. Our fallopian-dystopian book of hours. Our compendium of divine lounge chair prayer. Our atlas of bald breasts lobbed. I think these poems are what a soul assembling itself sounds like. They are ramps of energy, they are martyred and murdered efforts, they are alive and playful and full of verve and dead serious biting me with their French-tipped teeth. -Darcie Dennigan, author ofMadame X Agatha orchestrates a sonorous journey through the tales we tell-and are told-of the body alive, affected, and idealized. Mythic and indomitable, the layered voices throughout parse the violence and contradictions of sainthood and monuments, living and language. ""Find a saint / worth the sound of your voice,"" we are instructed. Orgera's is a poetics of accumulation and transmutation: breasts become couplets, syllables go missing, and euphemisms gather around a grave. Agatha charts a searing path into selfhood through cyclic remaking and lyric reclaiming. -Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies Mythical and biblical, etymological and sonically exquisite, Lex Orgera's Agatha opens in invocation and ends in reincarnation. Journeying through states of emptiness and revolution-with ""the good girl / gone wild,""-Orgera eulogizes CD Wright, riffs on PJ Harvey and Anne Carson, and pays homage to Agatha of Sicily, who became the patron saint of breast cancer patients after having her breasts torn off because she rejected her stalker. In Agatha's ""intergalactic orgy,"" wolves, ghosts, saints, dragons, and activists interact and acknowledge that even though ""Dying is our common legacy,"" ""everything shines / & primes us for shining."" Agatha is an example of this shining: a manifesto for survival crafted from a constellation of radiant observations and inquiries. -Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos Enter a collection of poems that invites us to commune ""where ice flower burns / orange bursts up from black needles,"" to stand at the edge of solemn perfection and dissolve into it. Like saints before her, Orgera's Agatha knows that to access the ecstatic sublime, we must regard beauty and pain in equal, material measure. In both commonplace and oracular terms, through language that, Stein-like, wakes the reader to its plentiful and even contradictory meanings, these poems allow us to relive our time here in the world until ours too becomes that more replete life of perception, until we too ""ate from / the dog's bowl. Always heard // the angels / singing, always heard / them in the trees."" -Danielle Pafunda, author of Along the Road Everyone Must Travel These fine lyrics thrive at the intersection of mystery and modernity, creating ""a carriage of entanglements"" and ever-deepening questions around collective notions of goodness, beauty, and the divine. Orgera's haunting, oracular voice emerges from a swirl of personal and saintly histories, delivering us to the mystical ""green-dark"" spruces bordering life's most profound beginnings and endings. This is fierce and delicate work from one of our keenest poets. -Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

Author Information

Lex Orgera is the author of two previous books of poetry, How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket, and a lyric memoir called Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer's & Other Brainstorms. Lex is a book editor, herbalist-gardener, animal parent, and partner in North Carolina, currently writing a book about herbs for emotional support and perpetually working on poems.

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