Choreic Period

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.

Praise for The Choreic Period  “The Choreic Period is a striking contribution to contemporary disability poetics, challenging ableist reading habits and expanding what poetic accessibility and difficulty can mean.”—CLMP Firecracker Award panel“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“Latif 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!

• Choreic At Stop & Shop Syntax 5 juillet 3 octobre8 juillet28 avril 20 janvier Djabote22 septembre 28 septembre9 aoûtAlegreDouglass Pool 9 novembre5 marsAt Stop & Shop 7 avril Syntax 12 février3 juillet 7 août CratylusAnalysis24 octobre27 septembre23 octobre 2 mai 24 juillet4 novembre Syntax5th & St. Marks Sequence 6 février28 mai Syntax 10 juin 18 février 24 février Fingerlicked 20 mars 4 novembre5 février 6 mars Syntax 27 octobre Analysis Aubade Foreword 24 janvier NotesAcknowledgments