The Choreic Period: Poems

(Paperback)

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A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.

Latif Askia Baan acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsyhonors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo. Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.

These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader:I am not here to accommodate you.Becausethese poems are not so muchforyou as they arewithyou, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.

With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do, all to see and sing the vital thing that we be.

Reviews

Praise for The Machine Code of the Bleeding Moon

Latif Askia Ba is the Virgil of cyborg poetics.The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective: Poems

Part seer, part seeker; part jester, part jazz riff, Ba is a gentleman fugitive from the laws of gravity and convention, jumping rivers and scaring off the cattle. The agility of the body that disability restricts is realized in extremis in his poetrys spectacular leaps and smooth movements across conceptual divides, as well as in its fluent musicality. It is impossible to imagine a debut collection more exhilarating, dynamic, and transformative than Bas, or a book of any kind more deeply rooted and airborne all at once.Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many

A dazzling meander through lexicons of bodies and technologies, The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon upends safe notions of what it means to be human. Departing from any predictable mode of autobiography or confession, this lyric self emerges in the midst of tech detritus, old CPUs and obsolete devices, at the same time operating withinspeaking within vibrant, syncretic fields of polyglot inheritances.B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive

Like a short-wave radio picking up stations, in an airplane traveling over various continents and time zones, Latif Ba introduces an entirely new structure and poetics to the world. Constructed of hum and stutter, breaks and ruptures, refrains, repetitions, hush and static, these ecstatic poems draw the reader back and back to them, and to their rich and infinite unfolding.Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion

Author Bio

Latif Askia Ba is a poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy from Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and was the Print Poetry Editor for theColumbia Journals sixty-first issue. He is the author The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon, and his work appears inPoetry Magazineand many other publications.