Onement Won

By Prageeta Sharma

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Following her acclaimed Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma's newest collection, Onement Won, is at once a contemplation and a sharp critique. Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity.

  Inspired by Barnett Newman's Onement series as well as many texts including the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, Goethe's Faust, and Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, these poems explore the concept of oneness in Hinduism, Abstract Expressionism, and selfhood in an attempt at “onement with lyric certainty,” a way through ideas of prosody to a clearer sense of what is needed in freedom, suffering, and art-making. The result is a stunning work that invokes ancient wisdom into an understanding of self-care that is fiercely anticolonial and anticapitalist, while holding space for suffering as a site of transformation for us individually and collectively.

  
  

• Previous Praise:

  "Sharma expands the tradition of lament in verse, as original an experiment in understanding and processing grief as anyone has written... Sharma brilliantly creates memory through her sentence, shattering any grief-cycle that has come before. She has created, artlessly, a theory of sentences."
  Diane Mehta, Electric Lit
  
  "This book doesn’t force lessons on its reader, and I’m glad for it. I do believe Sharma gained perspective from the passage of time, but the reader doesn’t have relate to it as a sort of universal experience. This is a book of personal grief, and an account of an individual mourning a specific, sudden, sad loss—a cruel and random one from which she shouldn’t be expected to glean a lesson"
  Niina Pollari, Fence Digital
  
  "How does a poet memorialize her beloved without erasing his complexity? Sharma writes candidly of the elegized’s personality — “your death was as sudden as your rage” — and of her unanswered anxieties: “Did he tell the doctor he didn’t love me anymore and that’s why I wasn’t allowed into those conversations?” In doing so, Sharma complicates her narrative away from sentimentality and into reality-fracturing emotionality.
  Emilia Phillips, The New York Times
  
  There is so much generosity and bravery within each utterance, offering an intimate view of the life adrift.
  Arkansas International
  
  

• Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Onement Won (Wave, 2025). She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Artistic and Aesthetic Practices, the Henry G. Lee ’37 professor of English at Pomona College and a recent recipient of the 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.