Overview

"In The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon, Latif Askia Ba brilliantly delineates the possibilities of the imagination as he builds a bulwark against humanity's creeping sense of hopelessness. By finding meaning in coding, mathematics, video games, music, dancing, and-most of all-poetry, Ba shows us that, regardless of the abilities we're born with, we are all capable of extraordinary things. A meditation on the body, the African-American experience, and what it means to live in the United States and the world as a disabled man, Ba's work is also, at its considerable heart, an ode to the poet's psyche and a testament to human capability. Latif Askia Ba is the Virgil of cyborg poetics. -The Cyborg Jillian Weise Part seer, part seeker; part jester, part jazz riff, Ba is a gentleman fugitive from the laws of gravity and convention, ""jumping rivers"" and ""scaring off the cattle."" The agility of the body that disability restricts is realized in extremis in his poetry's spectacular leaps and smooth movements across conceptual divides, as well as in its fluent musicality. It is impossible to imagine a debut collection more exhilarating, dynamic, and transformative than Ba's, or a book of any kind more deeply rooted and airborne all at once. -Timothy Donnelly A dazzling meander through lexicons of bodies and technologies, The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon upends safe notions of what it means to be human. Departing from any predictable mode of autobiography or confession, this lyric self emerges in the midst of tech detritus, old CPUs and obsolete devices, at the same time operating within-speaking within- vibrant, syncretic fields of polyglot inheritances. -B.K. Fischer Like a short-wave radio picking up stations, in an airplane traveling over various continents and time zones, Latif Ba introduces an entirely new structure and poetics to the world. Constructed of hum and stutter, breaks and ruptures, refrains, repetitions, hush and static, these ecstatic poems draw the reader back and back to them, and to their rich and infinite unfolding. -Cynthia Cruz"

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9781945233173

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Reviews

"Latif Askia Ba is the Virgil of cyborg poetics. -The Cyborg Jillian Weise Latif Ba's poems work like magic tricks-they happen before one's eyes and yet one is surprised by what happens. They are the products of great skill, and so, are more permanently surprising than the products of accident; they renew the reader, even when re-read. They stay news. -Shane McCrae ""This body, this body, this body: untrue,"" - enter poet as open reservoir for a heart's unfolding, out of body into world. These deeply moving poems encapsulate daily ritual as molten resurgence with every turn of the page. Emboldened by a storyteller's stroke, Latif Askia Ba embraces the poet's question to re-open the world we assume."" - Edwin Torres, Quanundrum As Ba writes with unflinching honesty about his body's flailing limbs and stammered speech, he questions not only the DNA codes that gave him his body-""the wound dumb luck carved into [his] neurons"" -but also the cultural codes of a nation that tends to push those in wheelchairs to the margins of our society. He provides us with a model of how we all might better live within our own functional bodies, and for this I am extremely grateful. -Robert Bernard Hass, executive director of the Robert Frost Society"

Latif Askia Ba is the Virgil of cyborg poetics. -The Cyborg Jillian Weise Latif Ba's poems work like magic tricks-they happen before one's eyes and yet one is surprised by what happens. They are the products of great skill, and so, are more permanently surprising than the products of accident; they renew the reader, even when re-read. They stay news. -Shane McCrae This body, this body, this body: untrue, - enter poet as open reservoir for a heart's unfolding, out of body into world. These deeply moving poems encapsulate daily ritual as molten resurgence with every turn of the page. Emboldened by a storyteller's stroke, Latif Askia Ba embraces the poet's question to re-open the world we assume. - Edwin Torres, Quanundrum As Ba writes with unflinching honesty about his body's flailing limbs and stammered speech, he questions not only the DNA codes that gave him his body- the wound dumb luck carved into [his] neurons -but also the cultural codes of a nation that tends to push those in wheelchairs to the margins of our society. He provides us with a model of how we all might better live within our own functional bodies, and for this I am extremely grateful. -Robert Bernard Hass, executive director of the Robert Frost Society

Author Information

"Latif Askia Ba is a disabled poet of Italian and Senegalese descent. He was born with cerebral palsy and grew up in Brooklyn & Staten Island, New York. He attended Edinboro University, where he received his Bachelor's in Computer Science. He was recently accepted into Columbia University to pursue an MFA in creative writing. At Edinboro, he discovered a passion for language and poetry, which led to his first collection of poems, Wet Monasteries. Since then, he has published award-winning poems such as ""Platform"" and ""Me in Marble."" He hopes to continue the rewarding work of appreciating and elevating Disability through the art of poetry language."

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