Against Heaven: Poems, Kemi Alabi
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Kemi Alabi’s award-winning debut Against Heaven dismantles the cultural fictions surrounding race, queerness, and redemption, offering instead a luminous vision of liberation rooted in the body, the earth, and the power of Black queer imagination. Through poems that are tender, fierce, and spiritually expansive, Alabi crafts a freedom dream that rejects empire and embraces self-defined paradise. A stunning and essential first collection.
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Against Heaven: Poems
Paperback – April 5, 2022
by Kemi Alabi (Author)
Remainder – offered at half the cover price
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, Against Heaven marks the arrival of Kemi Alabi as a visionary poetic force—one who challenges, reshapes, and ultimately transcends the cultural and spiritual narratives imposed upon Black and queer bodies. Selected by Claudia Rankine, this debut collection confronts the nation’s mythologies of respectability, redemption, and resilience, dismantling the fictions that have long defined who is worthy of grace.
In place of prescribed salvation, Alabi turns to the sensual, the earthly, and the ancestral, celebrating the body as a site of liberation and the natural world as a realm of ecstatic possibility. Through love poems that ache with tenderness, incantations that bristle with righteous power, and meditations that beckon toward a freer future, Against Heaven charts a journey toward self-made paradise—a place forged outside the boundaries of empire and the gods that uphold it.
Alabi writes with breathtaking range, blending lyric beauty, political clarity, and spiritual ferocity. The result is a collection that honors the vastness of the Black queer spirit, acknowledging wounds while conjuring the magic, love, and resistance needed for healing. Radiant, defiant, and transformative, Against Heaven is a praise song for those who forge freedom from the ashes.
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