by Mary Sutton
January 21, 2025
The Choreic Period by Latif Askia Ba; Milkweed Editions; 96 pages; $19.00.
Latif Askia Ba begins The Choreic Period with an assertion of control: “I put a period in the middle of your sentence.” For the seasoned poetry reader, there doesn’t seem to be anything especially novel about upending mechanical rules in verse. E. E. Cummings began this practice more than a century before Askia Ba published this, his second volume of poems. With Cummings, we got spaces before apostrophes, the elimination of space between a comma and the next word in a sequence, the eschewal of punctuation and capitalization, and even the breaking of words into syllables and phonemes yet still lineated into neat, justified quatrains. But the period has a different effect on the reader: it enforces a pause, a limitation. Here’s where we stop.
Now, begin again. In this opening poem, titled “Choreic,” the speaker invites us to say something about a figure we have been told nothing about: “What is the most obvious thing about me. Tell me so that I know.” The question is rendered as a statement, followed by a command that we cannot yet satisfy. The speaker continues, breaking his own statements with these periods: “I want you. To say it because / In poetry we won’t say it. In poetry. We can’t say it. In poetry / we don’t want to say it.” To say, what? We neither know what the speaker wants from us nor what he wants from the form in which he seeks to engage us. We are left mute, which is the point: “I put a period in the middle of your disability. So that now. When I breathe you. Are trapped in my breath.”
Askia Ba lives with choreic cerebral palsy, a movement disorder within dyskinetic cerebral palsy characterized by a tendency to make irregular and involuntary movements. There is no specific test to diagnose the condition. It is, instead, a clinical observation based on what medical professionals observe and the experiences that the patient describes. What the poet describes, in a series of epistolary poems exchanged with a figure named Xadi, as well as several series of poems titled “At Stop & Shop” and “Syntax,” respectively, are the mundane aspects of living with this condition: going to physical therapy, needing a friend’s help to use an outdoor toilet, needing a cashier’s help to punch a PIN number into a card reader, using an EBT card at a grocery store and the judgments that often accompany that action in a country wherein no one is supposed to need help. Askia Ba wants us to know what it feels like to seek accommodation and only sometimes being accommodated, even when doing something as routine as reading a sentence.
Askia Ba is disciplined about using only the period, particularly in places where poets usually prefer the comma and em-dash, and breaks this internal rule only once in “10 juin,” where he incorporates a single ellipsis. In the Foreword to this volume, which is placed toward the end of the book (one of many routine ways in which our expectations are batted down by this poet), Askia Ba tells the reader that he began the practice of writing poetry using periods a year ago as a way to invite the reader into his body, to make the experience of disability a communal one, one in which there can be both frustration and levity: “Sometimes I knock the spoon over. The rice gets everywhere. / And you get frustrated. / Sometimes I knock the spoon. Over. The rice gets everywhere / and I get. Frustrated. / Sometimes. I knock the spoon over. The rice gets everywhere / and. We laugh." The repetition of this action, trying to eat a spoonful of rice, failing and trying again, is illustrated in these lines along with the pauses—or disruptions—that the body makes in its effort to get this choreography right.
While there are expressions of frustration, there is no sense of hopelessness or despondency. The speaker revels in sensory experiences—the color yellow, stars, the sun, and flowers are recurring motifs, underscoring both a connection to beauty and to the rhythms of life. In “Cratylus,” the only poem in the volume addressed neither to Xadi nor to the reader, but instead to the Heraclitean philosopher associated with what some consider to be one of Plato’s most vexing dialogues, Askia Ba envisions him as hysterical over his vision of a reality in flux coming true as the philosopher witnesses the speaker’s dyskinetic body: “You were right all along […] First. My body was a crisis. Then an enigma. Then a liability. Now it is a brief encyclopedia.” In the dialogue, when Socrates asks Cratylus what power names have, the former tells him that names have the ability to teach us. Cratylus goes further by asserting that the study of a name is the only way to know something about the referent’s being. The names that have been applied to those who live with disabilities, some of which now rightfully make us wince, have changed throughout the centuries. But how much do they teach us about the referent? Might they teach us more about ourselves and, in Askia Ba’s case particularly, about how we respond to the sight of unpredictability, of a body with a mind of its own?
Askia Ba may have a quarrel with poetry, but he is a formalist who upends convention, as he does when he imagines instructing Cratylus on how to rethink language: “If you’re confused / Cratylus. Try saying it back to yourself in a palsied accent. So that each spasm / is a word turned inside out.” In this text, epistolary poems may not be ordered chronologically and forewords appear backwards; but the appearance of disorder has form—not the straight line, but the circle: “These periods are part of my samsaric past. / To return. To be closely associated. With wheels.” Instead of linearity, predictability, and order, perhaps we should make more space, as the speaker ponders trying to do for himself in the final poem in the series titled “Syntax,” for movement, connection, wholeness.
In Askia Ba’s vision, the period is less of a place to stop a line and more of a point in space, as in Euclidean geometry, where possibilities begin. Those possibilities include the infiltration of non-Anglophone languages (French, Fulani, Jamaican patois, Wolof), even Spanish in both slang and onomatopoeia. These are the sounds of New York City, where Ba lives, as well as the languages of his heritage (he is Senegalese American). But there is never cacophony here; instead, a chorus. Ba, who resembles Virgil by leading us through scenarios that an ableist might view as hell, teaches the reader to join him on a journey to slow down, to relinquish expectations. Within this book, he illustrates how it feels to live within a body that does not always behave as you want it to, which may also help with living in a world that does not always behave as you want it to. The Choreic Period offers an astute lesson in gratitude, even for those who did not think they needed it.
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Deconstruction and Feeling in Latif Askia Ba’s The Choreic Period
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Cottonbro Studio from Pexels
Mary Sutton is senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets . She was formerly the NEH Scholar in Public Humanities at Library of America where she worked with Kevin Young on African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song and the book's companion website www.africanamericanpoetry.org.
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