Offsite: Latif Askia Ba: The Choreic Period w/ Jay Deshpande

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are required to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/g2A0DLUKo6A
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

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.”

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.

Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books) and the chapbooks The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books) and The Umbrian Sonnets (PANK). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award and the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a Kundiman fellowship, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. Jay holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia. He leads the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and teaches in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.

Host or Publisher Books Are Magic