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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 Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors 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.” Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, 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.”
Praise for The Choreic Period
“The poet Latif Askia Ba writes, ‘I become the verb you have yet to name.’ A poet holding space in a future where he waits for us to catch up. The entire book awaits us. In brilliant flashes, the poems pull us into their innovation. A period. Takes the pause. If a period could be italicized, this is the poet who could do it. I love every moment in every poem, I’m a huge fan.”—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
“Latifa Askia Ba wields the period like a composer’s baton, creating rhythms that affect change at the somatic level. To read The Choreic Period is to breathe differently. Within this asymphonic linguistic symphony our bodies like words become openings moving ‘the subject forward.’ Toward . . . Through the intense particularity of the syntax of the ever-humbling disability within and without language, The Choreic Period bears witness to the universal disability of beings locked within what it means to be human. The Choreic Period is a pulling—of stars from drains; is a blessing; is a bless up that leaks the wisdom of knowing ‘without understanding.’”—m. nourbeSe philip, author of Zong!
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 the Columbia Journal’s sixty-first issue. He is the author The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon, and his work appears in Poetry Magazine and many other publications.
Choreic
At Stop & Shop
Syntax
5 juillet
3 octobre
8 juillet
28 avril
20 janvier
Djabote
22 septembre
28 septembre
9 août
Alegre
Douglass Pool
9 novembre
5 mars
At Stop & Shop
7 avril
Syntax
12 février
3 juillet
7 août
Cratylus
Analysis
24 octobre
27 septembre
23 octobre
2 mai
24 juillet
4 novembre
Syntax
5th & St. Marks
Sequence
6 février
28 mai
Syntax
10 juin
18 février
24 février
Fingerlicked
20 mars
4 novembre
5 février
6 mars
Syntax
27 octobre
Analysis
Aubade
Foreword
24 janvier
Notes
Acknowledgments