Alum Latif Askia Ba '23 Publishes Second Poetry Collection 'The Choreic Period'

Writing alum Latif Askia Ba ’23 recently published his second poetry collection, The Choreic Period, with Milkweed in January of 2025. In it, he engages the literary version of rhythm using punctuation and grammar, notating syncopated movements of the body with unmeasured syntax. Ba likens the poetry to the “improvisational bends, twists, stutters, and stretches of jazz,” citing Miles Davis’s “Someday My Prince Will Come” as an influence while writing. Un-translated Fulani, Wolof, Patois, French and Spanish interrupt meaning as much as Ba’s use of the period interrupts sentences and his placement of meaning. 

However, “this book isn’t abstracted language soup!” Ba said. “There is meaning and narrative within it—but in nonlinear, jerky, and perhaps disorienting motion.” The reader, he says, has to “be ‘disabled’ by anormative syntax, surreal jumps between images, or words from foreign languages.” In distorting the normative operations of a hegemonic language, Ba inverts hegemonic power dynamics as well, challenging the able-bodied reader to ground themselves on an ever-shifting foundation.

Based in Brooklyn, Ba is a Senegalese-American writer with Choreic Cerebral Palsy. He assembled the manuscript during his second year at Columbia for his MFA thesis, saying, “The seminars I took during my MFA helped me to loosen my attachment to sense-making and storytelling when writing poetry, and allowed me to embrace language as material, texture, magic.”

In a book review for Psaltery & Lyre, fellow alum Jonathan Fletcher '23 said that “as good as Ba’s previous collection, The Machine Code of the Bleeding Moon, is (and it is), The Choreic Period is even better. It’s a revelatory, timely, and invaluable contribution to crip lit.”

Latif Askia Ba was the Print Poetry Editor for the Columbia Journal’s sixty-first issue. His work appears in Poetry Magazine and many other publications.