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.
 
PRAISE for Cathedral:
If faith is a thing of action, then the religion in Elontra Hall’s Cathedral is covered in sweat. In these athletic, skillful poems, the poet’s talents left me defenseless, unable to guard myself as Hall firing poem after glorious, hard-won poem at the rim of my heart. While the basketball court is the primary arena for these poems, it is the soul that is felt out of breath, or maybe shocked aware of its breath, by this stunning pamphlet. A voice to watch out for. If this is what he can do at half court, I am wonderfully frightened to see what he can do when we runs the full floor.
— Danez Smith
 
Cathedral is a luminous place, the basketball court becomes a chapel, Detroit a living archive, and language itself a place of prayer and fracture and the lyric voice has its own architecture. What emerges is a poetics of attention. At its heart, Cathedral asks what it means to build meaning from fracture and how we carry each other through time when language is the only structure left standing.
— Nick Makoha
 
Elontra Hall is one of the most exciting new writers that I’ve read for ages. Cathedral is the perfect combination of form and passion. This poet is definitely one to watch.
— Roger Robinson
 
‘The heart-sung lyrics of Elontra Hall generate a space made sacred by their stranding of melody and memory. Through this space the poet passes, now son, now father, now lover, now mourner, as the space changes too, from cathedral to basketball court, home to far away, right now to long ago, each flickering vision lit by the spirit of the others. Cathedral is a superb pamphlet from an original and thrilling new voice.’
— Glyn Maxwell
 
Lord, make me a cathedral’ - and this moving collection is indeed such a sacred space, holding histories despite erasure, honoring legacies even as they contain difficulty, making room for joy as well as grief. Vital, affecting work that confidently builds its shapes of holding upon the page.
— Meryl Pugh
 
ABOUT Elontra Hall:
Elontra Hall is Black American Poet. He is a Griots Well Alumnus, a Watering Hole and Obsidian Fellow, and a Poetry School MA graduate. He has been intern editor for Ink, Sweat and Tears, and also edited Magma 94: Remix. He has been published in Poetry, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, Shō, Propel, and other journals. He currently lives and teaches English in the Midlands.