Existential Reflection Summer
This one's not like the others
I’ve noticed a lot of new subscribers over the last couple of months! Firstly, thank you! And deep gratitude to those of you who have stuck with me for the last several years. Secondly, let me re-introduce myself: My name is Ashna Ali, and I am a child of the Bangladeshi diaspora raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn. My debut collection of poetry, The Relativity of Living Well, tells the story of my becoming disabled by COVID-19 in 2020, when I was a full-time New York City public high school teacher. In a previous life, I was a full-time academic and educator. Now, I serve as a poetry editor, teach online classes, and privately serve a variety of clients as a speaker for disability justice, editor, copyeditor, private tutor, and remote administrator. Here on Pain Baby, I meditate on disability, poetry, and how to be a body in unjust, apocalyptic times.
I post once a month or more with reflections, invitations, announcements, and selections of poetry, essays, and music that move me, and share invitations to attend events, submit poetry, and other cool things I think are worth attention.
As a body whose needs and limitations do not align with late capitalism’s grind culture and 9-5 structures, I juggle jobs and make money by writing and teaching online. All content on this Substack is free, but if you have capacity to support a disabled queer brown poet, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a labor of love, and your support means the world. Thank you for reading!
Brittany Allen, staff writer at LitHub, recently wrote, “I’m calling it for Existential Reflection Summer.”1 Most people in my circles are struggling to live functional lives in the face of so much constant horror. All the powers that be are focused on keeping us so battered by the onslaught that we are too exhausted and demoralized to call for justice in our cities, for our people, for queer and trans children, for anyone with a uterus, for migrants and immigrants, for anyone courageous enough to insist on the right to speak truthfully, for Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Iran, and so many other places where justice is ignored and American hands are dirty. As my boo Michael rather aptly put it, “The vibe right now is just so very much.” (Have you read Jon Sands’ new poem “It’s A Lot” about this vibe? It’s pretty fire.)
This is not a combination of elements that lends to “hot girl summer” energy (though I’ll keep wearing my Offbeat Citrus crop with pride), but profound self-interrogation and reflection. While I have no choice but to spend much of the summer juggling gigs, I intend to spend as much time as I can reading, listening, and trying to better understand how we got here, how I got here, and how I’m going to proceed.
Despondency and blunted existential trauma aside, I just had a birthday that brings me much closer to forty. As I grow into something of an elder, I cannot help but see this year as an invitation to think: What does it mean to be a queer, brown, feminist disability advocate and poet in a moment where words are increasingly losing their meaning? Where we allow people to die while we spend our time debating their definitions? When my body’s conditions make it so that writing, teaching, and speaking are my best inroads to making any kind of difference, what kind of relationship do I have to have with language, my disabled body, and the relationship in between to not only resist the injunction to disappear, but empower others to remember their right to free living and free speech? I am, of course, afraid. My friends are afraid. My friends abroad are afraid for us, though they are often only a few steps behind on the global march toward fascistic chaos.
Jia Tolentino recently published a profoundly relatable essay that accurately reflects how difficult it feels to retain a sense of reality these days. Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay on despair now lives on my phone for frequent visitation as a buoy. I imagine it’s time to read and re-read Ross Gay to keep one’s soul afloat. This is my goal this summer: to find nourishment, stillness, quiet, and move into the fall with some articulation of purpose, of a living that goes beyond what Lauren Berlant calls “living on,” or the state in which we struggle to maintain a sense of being while straining toward ideals that no longer exist, and that in fact do us harm.
Even through all this mess, there is joy. MAMDANI! Also, my recent residency at Randolph College’s low-res MFA program in Creative Writing left me wildly rejuvenated and committed to my writing. I had the pleasure of serving as MC for Toney Lombardi’s book launch for his stunning debut, Murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025) at Brooklyn Poets. It was such a moving moment to see this wild labor of love come into the world. Similarly, yesterday, I had the honor of hosting The Freedom Festival’s closing poetry open mic ceremony and meditating with other thinkers on what it means to be free in America. Poetry community heals so deeply. Tonight, I’m reading at Lonely Christopher’s new joint Poetry Hell at Enoch’s (with Sol Cabrini, Ry Cook, Elias Diakolios, and Stacy Skolnik), a free poetry reading from 4pm-6pm. Come through!
Next week (July 17-18), I’ll proudly be attending the New York City Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island for the first time, hanging with the good folks at Poetry Society of New York. If you’ll be attending, please come say hello!
I am two weeks into teaching my Poetry Society of New York six-week intensive workshop, Queer Poetics of Disability. Together, we’re exploring the Crip Theory and the poetry that speaks to it to see how we can leverage poetics to reflect our experiences as chronically ill and disabled bodies. It’s only been two weeks, and I feel radically altered and deeply grateful.
I’m spending the last two weeks of July back home in Italy to touch some grass, eat my mother’s plum tomatoes in the garden, listen to the sea…and try not to throw my phone into it. I’m also taking a boy home for the first time in many years. Pray for me.
I hope to take each of these opportunities to slow down. To that end, I am postponing Pain Baby Book Club and Pain Baby Podcast indefinitely until I have the energy to invest in both endeavors with the energy they deserve. I will be less available. I will find stillness wherever I can find it, and learn to live, however briefly, in its pocket. I’ll be sure to report the results.
Announcements and Invitations:
Today’s reading, Poetry Hell, will take place at Enoch’s, 480 10th Avenue, New York, NY. No tickets, no fee. Come through!
Grateful to have this little poem, “When Asked What Example I Set For My Brother’s Baby Girls” in The Margin’s folio, “Mehfil”
I had the honor of reviewing IMGE Dance’s fabulous show “(no)man” for The Amp! Read here.
Epiphany Spring/Summer 2025: Desire & Dread is available for purchase! As poetry editor, I am so proud of our curation for this issue. I feel like I really came into my own as an editor and a curator, and was honored to feature fresh work from many beloveds and meet and fall in love with the work of so many more!
Celebrating and Uplifting
MC Hyland’s new book, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Meekling Press, 20205) just dropped, and she’s in New York City to launch it! Join us on July 10 at Unnameable Books!
The next Kan Yama Kan is on Friday, July 11, featuring Angelica Heaney, Fatin, Maggie Milner, and Dina Abulhadi, MC’ed by hype master Karl Michael Iglesias! Buy tix.
Yomalis Rosario’s free monthly newsletter We The Soil shares resources for BIPOC writers, including workshops, residencies, scholarships, and fellowships. Now, We The Soil is expanding into a publication! Submit!
Friend, mentor, and all-around sweet genius Hala Alyan dropped a memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, that’ll rip your heart out. Here’s an excerpt.
My brother in poetry Toney Lombardi’s gorgeous debut is now available for purchase. Buy Murmurations, sit with Amy Winehouse on, and grab some tissues!
Crip sister Leigh Sugar taught me how to live as a spoonie and an abolitionist with ethics and grace, and she is interviewed about her excellent new book Freeland (Alice James Books, 2025), here.
Danez Smith published a poem for all the they/thems in Poetry Magazine! Read this gorgeousness here.
Beloved Monica Gomery’s beautiful work was featured on Poem-a-Day!
Recommended
Addiction, by Major Jackson
In A Village in the West Bank, by Naomi Shihab Nye
Cedar Waxwing, Prycantha II, by Lehua M. Taitano
Disability Media:
Co-Regulation Podcast: “EP. 03 How to Stop Caring About What Everyone Else Thinks (Emily McDowell)
Disability Poetics: Cyrée Jarelle Johnson from Kenny Fries’ Disability Video Series
I would hyperlink the article, but I can’t find it. The phrase just lives rent-free in my brain now.
Reading this in September because I too was on a break (and currently sinking into the depths of news, which will cripple me further and other news, which I must dissemble and analyze to work with it). I'm afraid to announce that we are all one step from being under the thumb of fascism (speaking as a half European half Lebanese crip living in Europe and currently ripping my soul to shreds because why not), and what a horrific summer we've all had so rest is necessary and essential yet at the same time it's still going to kill us anyways.... okay, this is my queue to end this pessimistic rant. Well written. Glad you are on a roll with the scribbling (not meant to be poetic or romantic). Safe living/survival/whatever we're calling it now.
Very grateful for this abundance of literary sustenance despite the vibe being what you aptly noted as "so very much." Safe travels, and happy Disability Pride month Ashna!!