Seraphim
Description
Seraphim shares the joyous rhythm that sustains Black womxn.
Seraphim, Angelique Zobitz’s debut collection, radiates with light and wonder. These poems reveal how Black womxn and girls carve out, create, and pass along that lightness in their daily lives. Zobitz pays homage to an array of Black womxn, including bell hooks, Roberta Flack, and Megan Thee Stallion. If you’ve ever wondered how Black womxn can glow so incandescent, this collection is the answer. This isn’t about pain, despair, or the indomitable strength of Black womxn, but rather a vibrant celebration of the love and joy at the forefront of their lives. Seraphim speaks in many voices—sensual, angry, defiant, soft, vulnerable, and continuously reborn.
Praise for Seraphim
"Angelique Zobitz’s Seraphim radiates with flames and fierceness. Steeped in survival and salvation, devastation and affirmation, incantation and citation, Seraphim is a tribute to revolutions, delivering homage to an array of Black women including bell hooks, Roberta Flack, Megan Thee Stallion, and “Black Barbies backlit by gas station fluorescence / stunning—singing holy, holy, holy.” In Seraphim’s choral and volcanic world, Zobitz alchemizes terror into courage. In doing so, she “expose[s] what’s damaged to scrutiny and light,” inviting the reader toward their own revolution and revelation as she reminds us to “let sing, every word.”
— Simone Muench, author of 'Hex & Howl'
"Angelique Zobitz’s stunning debut, Seraphim, is animated by a desire that is not easily pinned down. “This could be worship,” she writes in one poem. “Loud and exuberant as every light / leached club where I once got hot and sweaty / to reggae, rubbed underneath some body / as vigorously as kindling before catching fire.” And indeed, the poems in this book spring from that genuine messiness of life, where faith and sensuality are not mutually exclusive, but spill over into one another. Seraphim explores and celebrates Blackness, a childhood in Chicago, motherhood, love, sex, home-cooked meals, the individual and collective power of Black women, survival, and the power of language. “We sang the stars / until each beat / bore aching witness,” one poem affirms, and in these full-throated exaltations, Zobitz’s language sparks and combusts on the tongue and in the heart. These poems will pull you under, time and again, and then raise you back up, gasping and full of light."
— Brian Barker, author of 'Vanishing Acts'
"I have read countless brilliant poetry collections, but only a handful that read as
revelations. Seraphim by Angelique Zobitz is one of these revelations. If this book were
a bird, it would be part bird of Paradise, part red-winged blackbird, a celebration of
Black joy, power, and womanhood and a hymn for those who question God “having
learned he only / made you to sing his praises.” Zobitz asks timeless questions about
humanness, suffering, truth and love in the context of America–its violence and beauty,
history of casting out those who dare rise in spite of and in spite of, a rising which may
“give us release / or burn us to the ground. “ Seraphim is the kind of prayer that should
be read by any one who has felt both held and singed by a family, a god, a country. It is
a lamentation and celebration strung from “beauty of glass littered fields grown over,
cracks / exposed for all to see.”
— Joan Kwon Glass, author of 'Night Swim'
