Poetry

The Choreic Period

Poems
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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.
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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.”

ISBN
9781639551187
Publish Date
Pages
96
Dimensions
8.5 × 5.5 × 0.25 in
Weight
7 oz
Author

Latif Askia Ba

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.

Praise and Prizes

  • “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