The Choreic Period: Poems (Multiverse) - Softcover

Ba, Latif Askia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1639551182 ISBN 13: 9781639551187

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2025

Synopsis

A CLMP Firecracker Award Winner

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.”

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Choreic

I put a period in the middle of your sentence.

I put a period in the middle of your sidewalk.

I put a period in the middle of your gaze.

I put a period in the middle of your bodyhood.

What is the most obvious thing about me. Tell me so that I know. 

I want you. To say it because

in poetry we won’t say it. In poetry. We can’t say it. In poetry 

we don’t want to say it. We say no.

No no no. No. Don’t say the thing.

Don’t say the thing. Never

say the thing. I put a period

in the middle of the thing. I put

a period in the middle of your disability. 

So that now. When I breathe

you. Are trapped in my breath.

So that now when I speak. You 

take refuge under my tongue. 

So that now when I. Dance you 

quake. In the dyskinetic

void of your abdomen.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1639551182
• ISBN 13: 9781639551187
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96