Rekh

Forthcoming Poetry Collection by Dante Micheaux

Rekh is a forthcoming cycle of sixteen poems by acclaimed poet Dante Micheaux that will be published in Serving for the Gawds: A Rainbow Serpent Anthology. Named after the ancient Egyptian word rekh (to know, to understand, to become wise), the collection treats poetry itself as a sacred technology of knowledge, divination, and worldmaking.

Each poem is dedicated to one of Rainbow Serpent’s sixteen deities – Geb, Maahus, Miau, Apuat, Khepera, Khonsu, Ra, Sobek, Ahi, Serq, Uatcha, Tehuti-Maa, Ptah, Hapi, Nu, and Amun – creating a sequence that moves between hymn, riddle, oracle, fragment, liturgy, and myth. Rather than simply describing these divine figures, Micheaux gives each deity a distinct poetic language, allowing form, rhythm, and metaphor to become extensions of their cosmological principles. Khepera speaks through continual becoming, Khonsu through dream and tidal cadence, Ptah through compressed acts of making, Serq through fragmentation and transformation, and Nu through primordial sensuality and boundless possibility.

Drawing on African American poetry, the ancient Egyptian hymnal tradition, Black queer aesthetics, modernist experimentation, and the visionary poetics of writers such as Jay Wright, Micheaux creates a work that is at once ancient and contemporary. The poems inhabit a liminal space between invocation and interpretation, inviting readers to learn about a cosmology through the experience of language itself. Rekh is both an independent literary achievement and an integral component of the Rainbow Serpent ecosystem. It demonstrates how a living mythology can generate new artistic forms across disciplines, extending cosmology into poetry while allowing poetry to become a site of ritual, contemplation, and transformation.

Rekh embodies Rainbow Serpent’s commitment to cultivating new Black queer knowledge systems through literature, visual art, performance, and emerging technologies. It is a devotional atlas, a book that teaches readers how to move through a universe where every god is a way of knowing, every image is a philosophy, and every poem becomes an opening into another world.