Inside the Orb of an Oracle
by Dannie Ruth
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We asked Dannie Ruth two questions. Why did you write Inside the Orb of an Oracle and why do you write Poetry?
important. There should be more Poetry in the world.”
“I write poetry because it empowers me to be a vessel. Poetry is important historically because it
touches on the vastness of the human experience.”
2019 Summer Tide Pool Selection
“These poems enter you into a journey that you want to continuing knowing more of. Brilliant, inspiring and a must-read.”
A LOOK INSIDE
my world
I began sowing young
I had seen so many die
suddenly, slowly, miraculously
I began to understand the value
of a life and a life unfulfilled.
dozens of funerals, wakes, repasses,
phone calls, news reports, social media
posts I keep trying to count how many
people I have known to live and then
die, so dad and I can
think back, do the math
to figure out how old I was
always wondering who’s next?
…
HYPE
“What would we see when we peer Inside the Orb of An Oracle? Here, floating in the cloudy blue is the fluid geometry of family and history. Here, free verse that is actually free. Here, Ruth weaves the most visceral realness of life–food-family-blackness-South-Carolina–with the pulsing ethereal around it. Open “Inside the Orb of an Oracle” and watch a poet deconstruct form, language, and society in “Civil Eyes,” “line leader”and “guns.” Open, and watch the reconstruction of family, place, self, and dream in “Roots,” “Car Ride Lullaby,” “Silhouettes,” “The Explosion” and “a dream from New York to Detroit.” Inside the Orb of an Oracle is stealing glances into the inner world of a poet we are so lucky to have.”
—Samuel Fischer, poetry editor of Toho Publishing
“Dannie is a whistleblower for the music that this country has hidden for way too long. She invites us into generational stories of music, food, familial relationships and divine history. Like the stories in this book — her words are resilient, intimate and offer a gentleness. These poems enter you into a journey that you want to continuing knowing more of. Brilliant, inspiring and a must-read.”
—Ramya Ramana, author, poet, educator
“Dannie Ruth’s poems sneak into you. They start with music (hymns and Earth, Wind & Fire), then food (collard greens and cherry pie). We see the family reunion (just for the cousins) and the plates of oxtails. But don’t be fooled; the rich and nostalgic belie things deeper: pain and death and slavery’s legacy still unfurling. A dog is shot and in (mistaken) carnal message thrown into Ruth’s front yard. Claude Neal is mutilated and tortured. A grandmother dies, and in quick succession, an aunt. A young Dannie Ruth asks, “Who’s next?” But from this line of unfulfilled lives, a young sower is born. And Dannie Ruth’s poetry—like her father himself (the fireman running into the natural gas blaze) and her great great grandfather (three farmed and three wived in the south)—is a lotus from the mud. Inside the Orb of An Oracle‘s roots will take hold, and you will want (and need) to read it again.”
—Andrés Cruciani, author of The Father and founder of Toho Publishing
“Dannie Ruth’s Inside the Orb of an Oracle calls into existence the organic spiritual space its title promises, and uses it to engage — eyes open — with poetry’s potential for multidimensional, intergenerational healing. Ruth articulates a poetic consciousness — born from and into African American poetic histories and modes — that refuses to relinquish that “untethered bond.” In this poetic world-making, critiques of educational regimentation and exploitation are often voiced as critiques of linear thinking itself, and the ways they contract the spirit. She writes of the way that “books compress you,” posits that elementary school “line leaders” aim toward the school-to-prison pipeline that “stretches students from lines to sentences,” and critiques a PhD as a linear phallus. Ever aware of the fragility of bodies in the face of human and viral harm, the ways that family holds you close and divides you into “tribes,” these poems warn that language itself is also potentially violent. Nonetheless, Inside the Orb of An Oracle chooses language for its mode of healing. It calls us all to do the same: ‘You say you’re an artist, so you must know / what it means to use your hands / to shape a world / between mine and your own.'”
—Sophie Bell, Associate Professor of Writing at St.John’s University
Cover art by Nate Lewis
About the Author
Dannie Ruth
Dannie Ruth is a poet from Washington, D.C. and earned an MFA from The New School. Her poetry has been published in Sequoya, Toho Journal, and The Inquisitive Eater. Inside the Orb of an Oracle is her first published chapbook, which won the Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Prize with C&R press.
See Ruth’s first chapbook, Inside the Orb of an Oracle, here!
