Kemi Alabi discusses their collection Against Heaven with guest Taylor Johnson!

About Against Heaven:

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.

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Kemi Alabi was born on a Sunday in July. A poet and cultural strategist, Alabi is the author of Against Heaven, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection. Alabi's work appears in Poetry, The Atlantic, Boston Review, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, and elsewhere. Raised in southeastern Wisconsin, they now live in Chicago, IL.