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by Elontra Hall (Author)
Cathedral by Elontra Hall takes the basketball court as a site of devotion, where sweat, craft, and repetition become forms of prayer. Rooted in Detroit and stretched across the Atlantic, Hall's poems move between a remembered city of hoops, family, and street ceremony and a present life of fatherhood in England, carrying grief for a brother, a cousin, and the dead friends the title poem petitions to house. Cathedral is formally restless: mirrored structures, braided double columns, a haiku closing a prose poem, and a circling concrete piece all enact the collection's concern with how meaning is built and rebuilt from fracture. The recurring plea to be made a cathedral becomes both elegy and architecture, a way of holding the living and the lost in one structure.
