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ABOUT The Machine Code of the Bleeding Moon

“Latif Askia Ba is the Virgil of cyborg poetics.” —The Cyborg Jillian Weise

In The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon, Latif Askia Ba brilliantly delineates the possibilities of the imagination as he builds a bulwark against humanity’s creeping sense of hopelessness. By finding meaning in coding, mathematics, video games, music, dancing, and–most of all–poetry, Ba shows us that, regardless of the abilities we’re born with, we are all capable of extraordinary things. A meditation on the body, the African-American experience, and what it means to live in the United States and the world as a disabled man, Ba’s work is also, at its considerable heart, an ode to the poet’s psyche and a testament to human capability.

PRAISE FOR The Machine Code of the Bleeding Moon

“Part seer, part seeker; part jester, part jazz riff, Ba is a gentleman fugitive from the laws of gravity and convention, “jumping rivers” and “scaring off the cattle.” The agility of the body that disability restricts is realized in extremis in his poetry’s spectacular leaps and smooth movements across conceptual divides, as well as in its fluent musicality. It is impossible to imagine a debut collection more exhilarating, dynamic, and transformative than Ba’s, or a book of any kind more deeply rooted and airborne all at once.” —Timothy Donnelly

“A dazzling meander through lexicons of bodies and technologies, The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon upends safe notions of what it means to be human. Departing from any predictable mode of autobiography or confession, this lyric self emerges in the midst of tech detritus, old CPUs and obsolete devices, at the same time operating within—speaking within— vibrant, syncretic fields of polyglot inheritances.” —B.K. Fischer

“Like a short-wave radio picking up stations, in an airplane traveling over various continents and time zones, Latif Ba introduces an entirely new structure and poetics to the world. Constructed of hum and stutter, breaks and ruptures, refrains, repetitions, hush and static, these ecstatic poems draw the reader back and back to them, and to their rich and infinite unfolding.” —Cynthia Cruz

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Latif Askia Ba is a poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy from Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. Ba is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University and an author at Stillhouse Press. He was the First Place Winner of the Perceptions Writing and Art Contest, judged by Sheila Black in 2021, and the Second Place Winner of the Iris N. Spencer Award in 2020. His debut collection, Wet Monasteries, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2019.

For more news and press, check out Latif’s website.