Smokii Sumac. Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine. Roseway Publishing, 2025. 178 pp. ISBN: 9781773637259

Abstract

The opening lines of poetry in Smokii Sumac’s Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine succinctly introduce the themes of the book: its ritualistic daily rhythm of poems-as-prayers, the embodied empathy of the poet, and the violence that pervades the lives of colonised people. Throughout Born Sacred the poems acknowledge and document online interactions that lead to learning, empathy, and growth. In a very real sense, the comments that accrete around each posted poem or image, and the intertextuality, intentional and otherwise, of Sumac’s own posts and the platform as a whole, are a vital to the work’s significance. The book’s origin on a social media platform structures the logic of Born Sacred, which posits poetry as a political act of witnessing. To witness is to document the present moment as it happens; where another writer might take weeks or months to craft a poem, Sumac has chosen the obligation of writing quickly. In this sense, he actively transforms the commercial premise of the platform into a political tool, using the aesthetic power of accumulation to render his poetry an act of accountability. Those interested in Sumac’s project would do well to follow the poet on Instagram as well as buying this collection in book form.

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ORCID for Louise Siddons: orcid.org/0000-0001-9720-8112

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