ABOUT THIS BOOK

Poetry that serves as a broad collection of historical incidents and considers how we weigh and value events.

Named for a sura of the Quran, The Gathering is an epic in cantos that indiscriminately records deeds and events that have taken place on this earth. Its speaker—a nearly omniscient archivist—is propelled by a force more elemental than causation to visit moments and subjects, moving swiftly through thoughts, physiologies, and environments. Under an imperative to record everything encountered—however small, cruel, or sad—the archivist must grant radically equal weight to each thing. Yet as these entries accumulate, a strange significance accrues, and the negligible seems necessary. Each mundane fragment of life finds consolation. What was, was; what happened, got to happen.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sherah Bloor is a South African poet and scholar and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. She is coeditor and co-translator, with Tayseer Abu Odeh, of You Must Live: New Poems from Palestine. She is editor-in-chief of the literary and arts magazine, Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, and her poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, and the New York Review of Books, among others.

REVIEWS

“I haven’t seen any recent writing like Bloor’s The Gathering. It’s a collection of forty-one poems, each titled ‘Canto’—and it stands up well under the weight that repeated title brings to bear. The poem enacts an expansive present moment in which everything (and anything) happens at once. With enormous patience and precision, Bloor tells us that ‘The seed is milled, its oil added to Galaxie Eggless/Mayonnaise’ and also that ‘A neutron star rips open, emits gamma rays, ionizes earth’s atmosphere.’ That last sentence I quote is not a conclusion; it is surrounded by others detailing daily life, life in the distant past, and life in a high-tech virtual future. Each is rendered in detail and given equal weight. This book is an ambitious tour-de-force bringing to mind (my mind at least) the work of Ezra Pound, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian. I admire it greatly.”

— Rae Armantrout, author of "Go Figure"

“The Gathering invents a ginormous universe of contemporary life, nature, philosophy, and time. In a series of cantos, non sequiturs form a deliberate chaos that, taken wholly, invent a brilliant tour de force of reality. In one, someone sees a mountain blow away like sand. In another, cave lions emerge from the Siberian permafrost and, in the next instant, someone falls asleep with a hot water bottle on her chest. Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein might be among this collection’s antecedents, but Bloor is her own wild genius.”

— Jane Miller, author of "From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry"

“With a subtle yet ample authority, Bloor's The Gathering proposes a wholly contemporary and, to me, wholly convincing vision of our human circumstance. All the persons and occasions of these poems are sites of a conflict between Spirit and Information, between Mythos and Techne. And at stake in the conflict is the very substance of reality. It is a fair portion of Bloor's genius to sustain the risks with neither hope nor despair obscuring them. There is a fearsome courage here.”

— Donald Revell, author of "Canandaigua"

“Thank God for a book of poems in which the speaking voice is no longer singular but disseminated into ten thousand cranial nerves, each flowing as a vivid river. A polyphonic, planetary, Anthropocene epic, reading The Gathering is like standing before a vast mural—magnificent, inexhaustible, impossible to hold all at once. Instead, it envelops the reader, undoing the illusion of scale and mastery, until one ‘twists his body to open his palms, his mouth.’”

— Shangyang Fang, author of "Burying the Mountain"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I

[Canto 1: Penelope reads that scientists are revising the idea] 15

[Canto 2: A sphere of iron ore moves through space. Collides] 17

[Canto 3: Sigma Scorpii emits luminosity into a red reflection nebula] 18

[Canto 4: The Soviet scientific drilling project selects its site—] 20

[Canto 5: Seismologists in the Black Forest Earth-Listening] 22

[Canto 6: Chromium has crystalised into a vein in the rockface] 23

[Canto 7: Jens can’t remember why he’s here. It’s only] 24

[Canto 8: The PHD-10624 MAYA Mix Taping Cording] 26

[Canto 9: A dot flashes onto Orion’s screen, glides] 27

II

[Canto 10: Abraham opens the tent, “Our visitors are here.”] 33

[Canto 11: “Somebody’s at the door,” Asmi presses her nails in] 34

[Canto 12: Kauna knows it’s too hot out there. In Swakopmund] 35

[Canto 13: The night mover drives Ren to the docks] 36

[Canto 14: A free-living single cell enters into Noa’s left eye] 38

[Canto 15: Flaminia can’t decide what sounds worse, “we are] 40

[Canto 16: In the auto body repair shop, Lugh looks over Al’s] 41

[Canto 17: Aram is on Miriam’s cloud filing through her memories] 42

[Canto 18: Moses expands the Peninsula westward using trash] 43

III

[Canto 19: Kneeling into red Darwin dust, Ned begins] 47

[Canto 20: In the Village of Happiness, Lizette just confessed] 49

[Canto 21: From the phone booth on St Christopher Street] 50

[Canto 22: Though Samuel said “God, give me what is good] 51

[Canto 23: “We knew the counter-revolution was coming”] 53

[Canto 24: Anike shouts from the bedroom, “I miss him.”] 54

[Canto 25: Will winds his right hand around Clio’s braid] 56

[Canto 26: Talia imagines the world’s ending and her mom’s] 57

[Canto 27: In the tea ceremony, Meiko upturns a wheel] 58

IV

[Canto 28: The priest says, “it is so silent here,” but Zara thinks] 63

[Canto 29: The spokeswoman for the Orthodox patriarch tells 64

[Canto 30: The Rabbi listens at the morgue door to the man] 65

[Canto 31: Kareema tells the mental health chat bot, “it’s] 66

[Canto 32: A magician shuffles three plastic cups about, stops] 67

[Canto 33: Siya buys a twenty-pound suitcase, carries it empty to] 69

[Canto 34: From an apartment window, Reed watches the dead] 71

V

[Canto 35: After the algal blooms, diatoms drop down the water] 77

[Canto 36: A red fox orients to magnetic south. Tilts its head] 78

[Canto 37: A Mobile Drilling Rig slides into Taklamakan sand] 79

[Canto 38: For fourteen months, the sunlight is blocked out by] 81

[Canto 39: On the hottest day residents lie naked in desert sand] 83

[Canto 40: Malak’s angel print sublimates off the rooftop] 85

[Canto 41: A fluorescent light switches on. Sound of a helicopter] 87