Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Porter Square Books is delighted to welcome Kemi Alabi for Against Heaven, called "a stunning debut from one of our most talented emerging voices". Joined in conversation by poet laureate for the city of Boston Porsha Olayiwola, Alabi will discuss magic, portals, spells, and altered states in their poetry. This event is free and open to all, hosted virtually via Crowdcast on Thursday, April 21 at 7pm.
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.