Written from within a blessedly unfinished and particular life, Les Portes is a tender meditation on intimacy, survival, the violent history available to repeat, and how we might, nonetheless, reach toward each other. Moving from the childs doomed certainty of the gendered harm she will inherit, to the enclosing repetitions of queer domestic abuse, to the womans flight away into the bright world again / carrying every year of [ her] life in [ her] hands, this searching debut allows us to witness a voice wrestling with form in order to come honestly into its own. I am grateful to this poet for her honesty, her opacity, her directness, her ambivalence, her arrival, not at closure, but at more openness to questions about how to desire a future absent of harmafter we break apart, shatter, / melt down the very machinerywhile living on in a world, a self, so thoroughly shaped by it. That is, this is the kind of book I find myself reaching for these days, one that helps me to feel something new about how to live, as we all do, in the aftermaththe aftermath of our personal traumas and losses and leavings, the aftermath of the racist/heteropatriarchal order that gives them form. Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of An Optimism
Meredith Nnoka is a poet of daring ethical imagination. Through language at once elegant in syntax and jagged in emotional truth, Les Portes excavates an unknown history of fire in order to move closer to something like love. To understand harm, its origins, and how to address it, Nnoka is not satisfied to examine only the self or the immediate other; she must investigate whole family histories as well as the power structures built around race, gender, and queerness. But never does she forget the everyday scale at which intimate partner violence occursnor how a single illuminating image can push toward another life possibility. What an expansive and unforgettable debut. Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
"Les Portes is a book we all must take into the next phase of humanity, of history. Nnokas way of truth telling is so alive, so patient and precise, I feel almost immobilized. I recognize all these thoughts and feelingsI have not been alone. This poets knife work cuts it all open, incisive, bloodletting. I breathe this living truth all in, poem by poem, and even though 'were not safe yet'I feel such hope blooming in my blood. Yes." Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum
"At once haunting and refreshingly uplifting, the poems in this small, powerful volume invite readers into the space where love, pain, and desire meet resistance and hope. Nnoka is a beautiful writer whose body of work centers on a clear analysis of harm in queer relationships, while revealing the complex space between self soothing and surrender. The poems are graceful and generative and will seep into the heart of readers from start to finish." Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
"Nnokas poetry is the contribution I did not know was missing from what I and others sometimes mark as abolition feminism, or our collective experiments that demand the world do the work to end forms of impersonal violence without deepening the carceral state." Erica Meiner, from the introduction
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta