Praise for Agatha
“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
“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
“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 loungechair 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 of Madame X
“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
“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