The Relativity of Living Well available for pre-order!
+ Upcoming Readings, the Freedom Festival, and Blasian March
My inability to contain my excitement had me dropping hints for months, and now it’s finally here! My debut collection of poetry, The Relativity of Living Well, is now available for pre-order from Bone Bouquet for publication on September 15, 2024.
I started writing this collection in 2020 when I contracted long-COVID as one of the very few queer professors of color at the high school early college where I taught at the time, attempting to support students through the trauma of lockdown and the series of world-shaking political upheavals that followed. The poems trace my journey from that moment into the present, where I have made a new life for myself as an artist and disability advocate, trying to build dams against the psychic violence of imperialist state violence and genocide. The process of writing through the experience of becoming disabled, getting diagnosed, and building a new professional and personal life from the ground up against—and in relation—to our obscene political present may very well have saved my spiritual life. I built crucial disability and poetry community that helped guide me through my grief at losing the body I once lived in, learn to live with dysautonomia and chronic pain, and share my experience through writing and poetry in hopes that my experience may be useful to others.
Bone Bouquet is one of the first publications to take a chance on my poetry and I could not be more honored to have my first book come out with them. I’m beyond delighted to have Katia Engell’s collage and design work grace the cover, which I could not love more. Look at this gladiator-helmeted fishbird. Could she be more mythic?
Pre-ordering books by first-time authors and small presses helps publishers determine sales and indicates demand to booksellers, ultimately boosting both demand and sales and uplifting the book and the author’s profile. If you have enjoyed my poetry or my work on this Substack, consider pre-ordering!
Praise for The Relativity of Living Well
Ashna Ali’s debut sings the body as it rises from the siege of ableist paradigms to bring it closer to being loved and farther away from its imprisonment. These poems document how we lived by the meagre metronome of the pandemic and in the frayed seams of the social contract— at the workplace, in the classroom, in bed with new lovers, in the kitchen with old friends, at the protest with comrades, in the Zoom room— and sustained a choral outrage against the betrayals of the racial capitalocene. These poems are arias that soar above the grating roar of “NYPD copters” as they “julienne the sky”; they offer us shelter in the “temples / of our many.” “Our destruction does not require imagination,” Ashna observes. But our survival does. And their book is a twinned movement — of both imagination and survival. This is a work of luminescent, concupiscent, dissenting intelligence.
—Divya Victor, author of Curb and Kith
In Ashna Ali’s gorgeous debut collection, The Relatively of Living Well, they traverse the world of chronic illness, intrapersonal resilience, and the profound grit of the collective, with tenderness and astounding language. “I am witness,” they write in “Arrival”, a beautiful poem on reclamation, “I am full up.” The lyrical, stirring imagery and descriptions recall the intimacy—and despair—of lockdown, the collective heartache of a global pandemic, the human necessity for solace: “After, we say./But there is no ‘after’ for months. There still isn’t.” In yet another piece: “Love remembers me,” Ali writes. These poems pulse with their own heartbeats.
—Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back and The Twenty-Ninth Year
Upcoming Readings
June 27: What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About It
Topos Too, 59-22 Myrtle Avenue
Doors 7:30 pm ET, Poems 8:00 pm ET
Join me, Theo Ellin Ballew, Aristilde Kirby, Morgan Boyle, and our MC and host Samuel Lang Budin, for a series of poems about unspeakability, avoidance, denial, and all the ways we duck and weave!
June 30: The Poetics of Freedom: A Poetry Reading with Rohan Zhou-Lee, Christian Aldana, and Ashna Ali; A Freedom Festival Event
1 pm ET | Registration required
Raquell Holmes, my fearless leader at improvscience, the theater and improv-based DEI consulting and training company for which I serve as administrator, founded an extraordinary nation-wide festival exploring what the notion of freedom from Juneteenth through July 4th. I am very excited to partner with The Freedom Festival to produce “The Poetics of Freedom” featuring two of my very favorite poets and people, Christian Aldana and Rohan Zhou-Lee, whose poetry and arts and political organizing work in New York, Chicago, and beyond have made tremendous impact on our communities. After the reading, we will have a short panel discussion about the work we read and the questions they prompt with Raquell Holmes as our moderator. I’m so honored to share a line-up with them and be part of the Freedom Festival. Join us, and check out the rest of the festival’s offerings!
Save the Date: Priyo@Parlay, July 7, 6:00 pm ET
Parlay, 4024 8th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Ticket link forthcoming
June’s Priyo@Parlay was a gorgeous success, and Sean Devare and I are very excited to host prose writers Tanaïs and Manish Melwani, drag performer Noah Thing Deleuze, and a musician TBD for our next Priyo July 7th! Join us for some great fiction, performance, music, and food and drink! Ticket link will be available in a few days and can be found in the link in bio at Priyo@Parlay.
Extremely Cool Things My Friends Are Up To:
BLASIAN PRIDE: JUNETEENTH EDITION with Freedom Festival featured poet Zora Satchell
June 22, 2 pm ET | Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn, NY
To honor the underrepresented experience of mixed-race queer experience, Blasian artist, performer, poet, and organizer Rohan Zhou-Lee started Blasian March, a solidarity action between Black/African, Asian, and mixed Blasian communities. This year, Blasian March is collaborating with The Freedom Festival to feature a Blasian queer poet I respect and adore, Zora Satchell, whose work stuns, amuses, and moves every time I hear it. Join the march, listen to Zora, and march for the right to be exactly who we are.
Lara Atallah’s Off-Beat Citrus
Badass designer Lara Atallah, who is also the author of the gorgeous collection of poetry Exit Signs On A Seaside Highway, has launched a line of apparel, journals, tote bags, phone cases, hats, and more to raise funds for the children of Palestine. You can look incredible while helping out the most vulnerable children in the world. Get your goodies!
Until next time!
Waou!!! I read the chap book this summer and it was an emotional fabulous read. It was interesting also to read your journey with disability. As we are so diverse a community because of the many many different disabilities which exist, your search for words was like reading a diary. Can't wait for the moment in which I can get this next book.
an honour/honor to make the cover for this beautiful piece. you are such a creative force, Ashna !!!