[01/21/25] Askia Ba, Latif: The Choreic Period

Milkweed Editions, paperback

Publication Date: January 21, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 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."