The Relativity of Living Well Meets the World!

Upcoming Readings, Opportunities, and more

This Sunday, September 15, is the official publication date for my debut collection of poetry, The Relativity of Living Well! This collection recounts my experience becoming disabled by long Covid-19 in March 2020 and slowly but surely having to shift my identity, career goals, and politics to reflect a new life in an ableist world hell-bent on genocidal capitalist supremacy over the next four years. I am deeply grateful and honored to have this book published by Bone Bouquet, a small press whose journal by the same name was one of the first to take a chance on my poetry many years ago. Krystal Languell, who steers the Bone Bouquet ship, is one of the most open-hearted and no-bullshit badasses I’ve ever known, and I will be forever grateful and glad to have had her by my side while putting this story out into the world. See below for the stunning cover designed by the wildly talented Katia Engell, and praise for the collection. Order here.

Cover Design by Katia Engell

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 KITH and CURB

The Relativity of Living Well is unflinching in its honesty, in how it exposes the decaying bones of empire, late stage capitalism, and the cognitive dissonance of persisting through a deadly pandemic that our “reptile puppeteers” hope we will forget about. Ali invites us to feel our rage deeply, to move through stages of grief, through denial and distraction, and allow ourselves to be transformed by it. Ali gives the reader permission to be “here in the full flesh/of your body in all of its brokenness and beautiful mess,” and wishes on us a “plenitude of time.” And isn’t that what we want for ourselves, for our loved ones? Time on this earth over generations to build something more beautiful and more just together, so that when “someone asks who has felt cared for lately,” we can all answer with certainty: yes, I have.
-Christian Aldana, author of THE WATER WE SWIM IN

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

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DATES TO SAVE! Upcoming Readings:

Brooklyn Art Book Fair, for Sick Magazine (in-person)
6 Waverly Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
Saturday, September 21, 2024, 1 p.m. ET, Free and Open to the Public

I have the honor of representing Sick Magazine, a beautiful U.K.-based journal that centers the experiences of the sick and disabled, at this year’s Brooklyn Art Book Fair! My crip kin heidi andrea restrepo rhodes interviewed me for Vol 4., and that interview is reprinted as back matter in The Relativity of Living Well! I am joined on this line-up by none other than Leora Fridman, Theo LeGro, and Maria Gray! The book fair lasts all weekend, but if you want to catch us, you’ll have to come around the corner from Recess Brooklyn to the accessible area on Waverly on Saturday afternoon. See you there!

In Surreal Life Afterlives “NEW SHIT EDITION”
Wednesday, September 25, 2024, 7 p.m. ET(Online), Free

Several subscribes are alumni of In Surreal Life, the online creativity school founded by the inimitable Shira Erlichman, that I have had the honor to steward alongside Judith Ohikuare for the last two years. If you are an ISLien and participate in Afterlives, please join us for NEW SHIT EDITION, an online reading where our fave hype queens Kristin Klueke and Rachelle Boyson will host and MC an open mic where any ISLiens with recently published poetry are invited to share, and featuring readings from chapbooks or new collections by T. De Los Reyos, Persephone Young, myself, and more! Further details TBA. (If you are not an ISLien but would still like to attend, please DM me.)

Lavender Room with Jon Sands (in-person)
Taylor & Co, 1021 Cortelyou Rd, Brooklyn, NY
Thursday, September 26, 2024, Free and Open to the Public

My gorgeous neighborhood bookstore Taylor&Co Books, owned and run by beautiful spirit and poet Andrew Colarusso, hosts an intimate reading series called Lavender room in which two poets sit, read, and talk to each other about one another’s work. I am supremely honored to share this space with Jon Sands, the master behind one of the world’s best online poetry workshops, Emotional Historians, host of SupaDupaFresh, and author of It’s Not Magic. This event is free and open to the public. Roll through!

The Relativity of Living Well Official New York Book Launch! (in-person)
Brooklyn Poets, 114 Montague St, Brooklyn, NY
7 p.m. ET, Ticket details TBA

I am beyond excited to have my official New York City book launch take place at Brooklyn Poets. Over the course of my internship summer before last and since, it has become a second home to me where I have connected with some of the warmest poets I’ve ever known. Please join us on October 4 to celebrate the release of The Relativity of Living Well featuring Fatimah Asghar, Eduarado Martinez-Leyva, Rohan Zhou-Lee, and more, with host and MC Anthony Thomas Lombardi! It’s gonna be a party!

Dodge Poetry Festival (in-person)
New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), 1 Center St, Newark, NJ
October 18-19, 2024, Buy Tickets

The Dodge Poetry Festival is Newark’s new initiative to bring poetry into its midst, and the programs are as lush as the line-ups are illustrious. I’m reeling from fangirl angst and pumped to pieces to feature on one of the Griots, Troubadours, and MCs: Poetry and the Oral Tradition panels on Friday, October 19, with Mahogany L. Browne, Imani Cezanne, Nancy Mercado in Prudential Hall, and with George Abraham, Ashna Ali, Noah Arhm Choi, and Gein Wong for “Muddy with Ash: Community and Writing” on Saturday, October 20 in St. Patrick’s Pro-Cathedral. If you’re able to make it to New Jersey for the weekend, this one’s worth the trek—get some Brazilian barbecue to boot!

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Would you like to have me read work from The Relativity of Living Well in your series or city? Do you want your local bookstore to carry a book of poetry about disability, chronic illness, queerness, and survival under American imperialism? Are you interested in an interview or writing a review? DM me or email Krystal Languell at bonebouquet@gmail.com!

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OPPORTUNITIES

In Surreal Life October Session (online)
Applications through September 22

Shira Erlichman’s online creative school, In Surreal Life, is one of the most influential and important programs and communities in my life as a poet and as a person. My first session was in April 2020, and it’s what made me take myself seriously as a poet and produce the first drafts of the poems that are now part of my debut collection. If you need to shake up your creative life with the warmest, silliest, sweetest people you’ll ever know, sign up for the October session to receive daily prompts from Shira and enjoy exclusive Visiting Artist Calls with our fearless leader Shira Erlichman, Alex Cuff, Nicole Sealey, and if you’re BIPOC, Jeremy Michael Clark! This will be the last session for which Judith Ohikuare and I will serve as program stewards before passing the baton. Join us!

Poems I’ve Recently Loved

“Shahrazad, circa 2024” by Aiya Sakr
Palestinian-American poet Aiya Sakr explores the resources of flour and kevlar as they relate to inventive ways to survive in Gaza and draws gorgeous, terrifying parallels with adaptations in the natural world. These couplets play with blunt repetition and hard 180s only to pierce right at the jugular, quietly.

“Thinking about “The Little Mermaid” in the Waiting Room of the Otolaryngology Department” by Arianna Monet
This hard-hitting short prose poem is part of a series that cross-breeds fairy tales and experiences of blackness, queerness, and disability. It remains within 75 words to reflect both the limitations on speech that muscle tension dysphonia, a vocal condition, puts on a patient. The imagery is what really gets me—marine life, and thinking of Ariel from The Little Mermaid in the context of what it takes to be a woman worthy of sacrifice.

Three Poems by Kristin Klueke
When I think about how to keep my soul intact while living in America, I turn to Kristin Klueke’s work. These poems hold rage, joy, love, and bewilderment together in the same breath, and remind me to do the same. I love so much poetry, but these, these I not only love, but turn to for my own practices of gratitude.

Until next time.

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