The Lucent Light of Lethal Pain

Katie Berta examines the properties of grief in Prageeta Sharma’s new poetry collection “Onement Won.”

By Katie BertaSeptember 18, 2025

• Poetry

PEOPLE IMAGINE THAT grieving has a condition of repose, as though we mourn the loss of a beloved from a quiet, reflective position, depression pressing us into a frozen state. If you’ve grieved, you know that the version of grief in the popular imagination is often limited, if not false. The grief-brain is a whirling brain, thoughts splitting, shifting, coming unbidden. In Prageeta Sharma’s new poetry collection Onement Won, loss is a roiling, a tearing open, or as Sharma says, a wound. “I wanted to add ‘wound’ to the comparison […] // I found the condition of the wound / to be built into its state of cruelty,” she writes in “Metaphorically Charged.” In Onement Won, she is ruminating on the loss of her second husband to cancer (her first husband died of cancer too, in 2015—she wrote her last book, 2019’s Grief Sequence, in response to his death). And rather than presenting grief as a tidy “process” that the griever moves through and then out of, Onement Won discloses a whole new self appearing in place of the old one—or torn out of that old one and placed alongside her.

The “onement” of Sharma’s title is “a condition of harmony and agreement; concord,” according to a definition she provides in the afterword. The grief at the book’s center (losses of two husbands to cancer, of friends, of a stepdaughter, perhaps of the possibility of motherhood) splits the speakers into new selves and becomes the central impediment to the book’s speaker “winning” onement.

The book’s title also refers, more specifically, to Barnett Newman’s numbered Onement paintings, to which Sharma refers throughout the poems. In Newman’s series, a line of color, which he calls a “zip,” divides a canvas down the middle—or perhaps gathers the canvas toward that center, its containing and releasing zipper. Newman called Onement I (1948) “the beginning of my present life.” Sharma’s Onement Won runs the zipper up and down on her own present life. The poems’ speaker is yearning for a kind of onement with dead and estranged companions and with her own past selves.

At the same time, she is discovering separation from them. She moves toward and away from others and her own selves as she grapples with death, with the failures of friends, with racism and colonialism and the outsider status to which these systems relegate their targets, with the racialized and gendered splitting of the external self from the interior one, and also with the splitting the artist must tolerate as they make art that will ultimately exist separate from themselves.

The book’s first poem, “Irresistible Contentment,” for instance, begins:

I am talking my way back to the poem’s turn
and where it might lie outside my skirted body,
a corded place where bluish sky paints my attention,
and empties itself into a golden silence—
without talk or sound. Phrases now feel
perversely sentient and yet devilishly
wrong.

Is it tolerable for the poem to be birthed by you, to separate from you, and then to become unfamiliar to you? At the top of the poem, the speaker seems to look forward to this separation, but of course that’s what leads to its devilishness—that’s how the poem becomes sentient and capable of disconnecting and withholding, keeping you at arm’s length. The problem of any poem is that, for Sharma,

[…] morning’s magic
always looks opaque because
a stronger feeling replaced
the lesser one, and the rightness
must reach the poem’s hearted center
so that I am led to what might be
a plateau of nested changes

Can the zip flex around what’s grown bigger or changed shape? How much difference and distance—of self, between self and others—can be tolerated?

Sharma’s feelings about this are constantly shifting—and she deftly moves us between contexts in which this shifting abrades. In “A Memory of Its Ceasing,” she thinks about her childhood, the house she grew up in:

[…] now overbuilt, decorative for several decades,
but now with a slight gangly tarnish of neglect.
 
It’s still full of Hindu and Christian idols and celebrities:
Swami Ramakrishna, Sai Baba, and Jesus Christ.

The speaker has traded these “idols” for poetry (“The idols still sit with and without purpose […] // I find I am now freely espousing but also finding these marks / of idolatry in poetry”) and seems ambivalent about the effects of her choice. On the one hand, a return to her home and its particular composite of Hinduism and Christianity “is about coming back to a normalized moment with a steep, / and yet numbered center,” perhaps a kind of onement. On the other hand, choosing poetry “is about the ‘I’ that does the choosing of memories for a truer vision— / in seeing what might be down the vituperative road / and freeing this vision from its shame.” To reconcile these two feelings “is about coming back to oneself. […] // This is about size and succumbing.”

In “Love, Death, and Shadows (1959) in Missoula,” conversely, Sharma recounts teaching the groundbreaking John Cassavetes film to students at the University of Montana. Concerned with miscegenation, love, and art, and improvised, the movie was originally screened in 1958 and, in response to the intensely negative audience response, reshot in 1959 as a fully scripted film. Of course, this making and remaking are of particular interest to Sharma. What onement is there in art—and what selfhood too—if art becomes increasingly constructed, if there are multiple drafts, versions, selves, multiplying over the course of a piece of art’s life? But she’s also especially interested in the identity refractions contained in the film. It primarily identifies with three Black characters but was made by a white director; was acted, in part, by white players passing as Black; and is being analyzed in a classroom in Montana that doesn’t include Black people as students or teachers. Further, that classroom is housed in an institution, like most universities in the United States, that is grappling or failing to grapple with a history of racialized exclusion.

Sharma wasn’t immune to that exclusion. In “Onement,” she describes her job there as one “which showed me, over the years, pieces / of what a spectacular loss looks like against / the lucent light of lethal pain.” In “Lateral Violence,” she “look[s] back on how power systems / at play in microaggressions still impart feelings / of terror” even as she “sit[s] in this field, doing the scholarly work / of facing the empire, but wounded from those / whom we bitterly wanted on our side, not on our back.”

These nuances land us in a state of ever-shifting contradiction—the complication of the movie, its construction, and the hostile environment that receives it is almost unparsable: “[W]hy do I stand here feeling like it’s all so hard to hold on to?” her speaker asks. Sharma’s book has this quality—it moves out from under you, adding complication just as one feels it has reached a stable position. Sharma thinks deeply about Hinduism in Onement, taking the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita as inspirations, while acknowledging the damaging inheritance of the caste system. She grieves lost connections while reveling in new freedoms. To be reconciled, to be in onement, it seems as if you’d have to be still, static, but Sharma’s impulse is the opposite.

The gathering line of the zip in Newman’s Onement I draws new things toward it, incorporates them rather than resisting them. As Sharma says in “Maternal Endings,” “living in the precarity / is to both sleep and awaken to the truth, / to modulate in this consciousness so it doesn’t scare.” It’s this quality that gives onement (both the concept and this collection) its depth. Again and again, Sharma contrasts onement with ornament, which she uses in the sense of Anne Anlin Cheng’s “ornamentalism.” Cheng’s definition appears in Sharma’s “Index of Quotations, Aphorisms, and Ideas That Have Guided These Poems”: ornamentalism “names the perihumanity of Asiatic femininity, a peculiar state of being produced of the fusion of ‘thingliness’ and ‘personness.’” In Cheng’s view, “ornament is never mere ornament. It is an add-on that allows us, retroactively, to fantasize about natural personhood.” The shallow, external selfness of ornament, the feeling of being held outside of true connection, is what Sharma is fighting here.

In “How a Tale Lost Its Ending,” Sharma’s speaker recounts the way she understood, after her first husband’s death, how loose her family connections had been: “But then I learned, after he died, how little in common we all had except for food, / and the extravagance of a fevered materialism, of drinking nights away.” For her first husband and stepdaughter, she was ornamental, “was [her] culture”:

and for them, used for their yogic poses,
and when they wore Indian textiles around their middles,
 
and draped a mantra with a vowel around their tongues for fitness.

Perhaps no family relationship could survive a realization like this, and Sharma mourns, too, her relationship with her stepdaughter, the way “I felt I was included in mothering as a stepmother / but learned how easy it is to let that person, the stepmother, go. // She’s a tool, an aid, a manipulated appendage” (as she says in “Mothering”). For Sharma, the lack of depth, of closeness, of authenticity, led to a loss of self: “I felt like a thin, cheap version of myself.”

The expansiveness of Onement ensures that the speaker does not stay in this undermined position forever, even if shifting toward positions of strength and understanding also unzips new pain and loneliness. In “Onement,” for instance, she finds “a-tone-ment in a new oneness / I felt after he died and lingered in the sobering / daylight of my earned time.” And even as her second husband’s health disintegrates, there is connection to be found between them. In “Keeping Still,” she movingly describes a joint acupuncture appointment in which they both fall asleep:

I hear you churn a snore and wonder if I join you
in a hypnagogic sounding.
My head faces down in the cradle,
while we unconsciously create our chorus.
A cheering we do above our bodies crystallized
on the crisp paper sheet to an accompaniment
for our movement. Now a sort of liberty might transpire.

Sharma’s achievement in Onement Won lies in inviting all of life’s complication to enter—unity and disunity, that which is deeply quenching and that which starves—without retreat. These phenomena wash over the speaker, over us, and are integrated into her selfhood, into her understanding of a complicated world. As Sharma writes in “I Am Learning to Find the Horizons of Peace,” in which she tries to engage fully with the natural world in her husband’s last days of life, “I must try and see the whole of what’s in front of me without squandering it.” It’s not easy for her—for anyone. In a nearby poem, “Passions of the Void,” she despairs: “I am full of nothing akin to onement, / rather now it is a void full of suffocating ivy.” Any onement we’re able to win is brief, a shifting, tricky, transitory victory. But as Sharma puts it, “shifting through ailments, in particular, / is how to make peace with anything happening / at any moment.” Sometimes, she does.