“Báyò Akómoláfé is a philosopher who is pushing us to think outside of every narrative we take for granted. In this text, he guides us to reconsider how we relate to the world—and to internalize the fact that earth and all of nature are alive, relating to us. Selah is an ancient Indigenous orientation, poured through Báyò’s trickster poetry to make for a fresh agitation.” —adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism and Loving Corrections

“There’s a story about Borges, the great mischievous Argentinian writer, reading several books of Martin Buber and then discovering to his surprise that Buber was a philosopher. Why the surprise? Because Buber didn’t make arguments. ‘Arguments convince nobody,’ Borges explained. ‘But when something is merely said or—better still—hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination.’ Báyò Akómoláfé is—among much else—a philosopher, but what I find in his work is this kind of imaginative hospitality. It opens itself up to everything that goes missing from our arguments, everyone who goes missing, all the ones who stray from the straight way and learn to dance with loss, to travel like rumors, to elude cognitive capture. Selah is a book full of invitations to the unmarked paths that branch off from the highway of progress. There’s mischief waiting down those paths, and monstrous grace, and a poetry that unsettles all the assumptions we didn’t even know we were making.” —Dougald Hine, author of At Work in the Ruins

“Like the carpenter ant sporulating cordyceps mushrooms from its forehead, one has the sense that Báyò Akómoláfé’s insights might be dangerous to channel—that we are reading the final, perhaps fatal, fungal flourish of entities simultaneously too microscopic and too macrocosmic for our human organism to ever comprehend. These blessings do not offer protection. They offer divine infection—with mystery, with microbial anarchy, with revelry, and, most importantly, with a widened capacity for gardening in the ecotones of paradox. In a moment where there are no easy answers and no right side, Akómoláfé shows us how to play in the fertile interstices between species, and how to pray in the fertile compost heap between sterile ideologies.” —Sophie Strand, author of The Body Is a Doorway and The Madonna Secret