Against Heaven
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine.
Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.
Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, Alabi's ecstatic debut pulses with the language of Black queer joy. Simultaneously a celebration of the body and a story of resisting the oppression that polices it, these poems offer a condemnation of the racist, classist, and sexist foundations of what Alabi calls "empire," epitomized in religious belief. The first line of the first poem, "How to Fornicate," pulls no punches as it sets the tone: "After killing your god, hotbox the gun smoke." Alabi adeptly incorporates poetic forms ranging from erasure to the golden shovel, remixing inherited language from Louise Glück to Cardi B: "Splayed open slow, tempting a spill, grateful to be devoured like I'll/ Make my giggling groommates, spit-tethered hips churned tender flip." As the speaker in these poems abandons the colonizing mindset of empire, they wonder, "If forgiveness, uncoupled from the cross at our jugular, was a song we could know." Powerfully polemical, this impressive collection exclaims a message of liberation from body to the body politic.
