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

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

Mass for Shut-Ins  is the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected by award-winning poet Rae Armantrout.  Mary-Alice Daniel confronts tricontinental culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds. 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. " 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 "[A] striking debut collection... Daniel spins eclectically rigorous poems that reverberate with a Plathian edge and ear." —Rebecca Morgan Frank, The Poetry Foundation "[T]he center wobbles, threatening to undo the built environment. Through manipulation of stanzas, spacing, punctuation, and formatting, Daniel flirts on the edge of chaos . . . If this sounds like a criticism, please reconsider. Daniel here is doing remarkable work, asking readers to live inside a porousness of borders, both physical and mental." —Sara Beth West, Chapter 16 "as delicate and haunting as a ghost story whispered over the crackle of a bonfire" —Lenna Jawdat, Southern Review of Books "Mary-Alice Daniel invents her own form of church . . . The poems in Mass for Shut-Ins locate hell on earth . . . This bold debut contributes to a reverberating zeitgeist in modern society that is rethinking organized religion." —Chloe Xiang, Los Angeles Review of Books My favorite comment that a reader has made about my book: "What drew me to it—the darkness made it stand out.  True  darkness."  Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the border between Niger/Nigeria, then raised in England and Tennessee. She holds a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. Her first book, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents , was published by HarperCollins/Ecco Press in November 2022.   Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists , Conjure , and Wobble . This is her second year as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.