Description

Graywolf,paperback

Publication Date:April 5, 2022

Publisher Marketing:Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine.

Kemi Alabis transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our countrys central and ordained fictionsthose 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 Heavenis a praise song made for the flames of a burning empirea 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 collectionof magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirits capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healingthe highest power there is.