Onement Won

<p><b>Following her acclaimed <em>Grief Sequence</em>, Prageeta Sharma''s newest collection, <em>Onement Won</em>, is at once a contemplation and a sharp critique.</b> Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity.</p> <p>Inspired by Barnett Newman''s Onement series as well as many texts including the <em>Upanishads</em>, Th<em>e Bhagavad Gita</em>, Goethe''s <em>Faust</em>, and Audre Lorde''s <em>The Cancer Journals</em>, 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.</p>