This exchange happened via Google Docs in the first quarter of 2025. Some of the questions here were drafted by editorial assistant, Onyedikachi Chinedu and edited by interviews editor, JK Anowe, for 20.35 Africa.
20.35 Africa: Could you speak to me about the intersections of faith and desire, of the deviant and the instructional in Against Heaven? I am thinking particularly of the poem, “How to Fornicate,” that begins the collection. On first encounter with the title, a reader might imagine the poem as a procedural text for engaging with/in the erotic. Instead, it subverts its instructional framework with profound renunciations of the religious: “After killing your god, hotbox the gun smoke. / Cough out any vestigial prayer.” What is it about desire that makes it antithetical to the instructions of religious dogma? What is the role of metaphor in bridging these intersections?
Kemi Alabi: I was raised Baptist and taught to repress desire – fornication supposedly sends you straight to hell, and sexuality itself is unholy outside of very rigid confines. Even in its modern iterations, I was bombarded with messages like my body is god’s property, etc. This purity culture is mostly aimed at women and girls and serves as a dangerous form of social control. To me, it was important to reclaim bodily autonomy, both in my life and through my art. But I don’t think desire is necessarily antithetical to instruction. It’s still a kind of command. In the collection, deviance and subversion aren’t just rebellions against oppressive dogmas and systems – they’re recommitments to the erotic as defined by Audre Lorde. I include her definition as an epigraph in Against Heaven:
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
With this definition of the erotic in mind – a definition not limited to the sexual – I don’t think “How to Fornicate” actually subverts its instructional framework. It’s about reorienting toward that internal sense of satisfaction, that sense of self, the chaos of one’s strongest feelings – instead of toward some external rule-maker. For some, those desires may be aligned – which is fine! But that hasn’t been my experience, and it’s an unlikely one for those raised under ideologies that support the domination of some bodies over others – whether by gender, race, sexuality, caste, or anything else. Disobedience then becomes an empowering practice, and the collection hopes that personal empowerment becomes political empowerment, with collective disobedience as the goal.
In his essay “Lyric Knowledge,” James Logenbach writes, “The impulse to be lyrical is driven by the need to be no longer constrained by oneself.” Lyric poetry itself can be considered an erotic practice in Lorde’s sense; metaphor, sonic elements, and other poetic devices are ways to communicate beyond the concrete, beyond the strict dictionary definitions of language, transcending its limits to reach a truth the body feels versus one the mind simply understands. Lyric poetry, desire, and Lorde’s erotic all require a kind of faith in otherwise modes of being. This collection only troubles the idea of faith when it requires obedience to oppression and estrangement from the self. It pushed me, and hopefully the reader, to consider what liberation – and faith in one’s liberation – actually feels like in the body.
20.35 Africa: In the second titular poem, “Against Heaven,” there are changes to the original form of the golden shovel by Terrance Hayes, which only makes use of a single source text (Gwendolyn Brook’s “We Real Cool”), with words from Brook’s lines consecutively making up only the end words in Haye’s. You use multiple source texts in “Against Heaven,” various phrases begin and end each line. Can you talk about the important role of intertextuality in the making of the poems? Why was it necessary to meld these different texts to form a whole, regardless of its traditional form?
Secondly, what books, TV series, songs, etc., did you read, watch, or listen to when writing Against Heaven? What materials were necessary for writing the collection?
Kemi Alabi: One of my favorite Gwendolyn Brooks poems is “To the Young Who Want to Die.” It ends, “Graves grow no green that you can use. / Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.” The spirit of this poem lives throughout the collection and its golden shovels, so much so that I mention it in the notes section. I’m so grateful for the work of Brooks – and of Terrance Hayes, who brilliantly experiments with sound and form. His invention of the golden shovel is a great example of the remix, and I think Black American art, across forms, has mastered the art of the sample, the remix, the ability to take something that came before and make it new. And maybe that’s why I felt okay remixing the golden shovel by using other texts. The form could be called an acrostic, but Hayes and Brooks were the inspirations, and I feel like I’m writing in their lineage. Plus, nothing in this collection, nor the art culture I come from, prioritizes obedience to tradition. There’s power and reverence in a remix, and I needed to lean into that.
I also needed to be in intertextual conversations with the songs and speeches that make up Against Heaven’s golden shovels. The poems were written as replies to them. Encountering them sparked something in me – strong reactions – and the form allowed me to write into those feelings and curiosities without making them into linear arguments. Those would be essays, to me. That’s the beauty of poetic forms, and especially a golden shovel – it creates a container to flow and feel into, and it allows me to wander, to surprise myself.
I created this playlist to share the songs swirling in and around Against Heaven. It includes every song from the golden shovels and more. I also reference news articles in my notes section and other media that I used for the erasure poems in the collection. My creative process is informed by everything I read, listen to, see – I’m truly indebted to so many artists for inspiring what eventually makes it to the page.
20.35 Africa: The poem titles in the collection take a different route when the poem contents are examined. In “no more white girls, or what I learned from father,” the reader is met with the violence perpetuated by the father, and this violence occurs throughout the poem as a motif. At first reading, the title gives that the poem emphasizes “white girls” are off the menu, but the titles are ironic. What did you intend to achieve with such titling of the poems, especially when the readers pick up Against Heaven and are caught off guard by its thematic concerns?
Kemi Alabi: I think the titles are less ironic than they seem. The titles are the doorways into the poem and really important parts of the context. But yes, I do like to wander, to explore what’s underneath a thing – a poem is a walk, as A.R. Ammons explains. “no more white girls, or what I learned from father” explores how generational trauma and inherited ways of relating show up in romantic relationships. The context introduced in the title makes way for the revelations of the poem, and I think a lot of my work operates this way – not telling detailed stories, but introducing a little context, wandering with the lyric, and allowing the reader to make their own connections.
I also think disorientation can be a very powerful experience. We operate under so many scripts daily, and we expect the art we consume to obey those scripts. But disorientation can move the reader from passive consumer to active participant, invited to connect new dots and reorient to a different set of expectations. It’s a necessary political practice to slow down, move away from one’s preconceptions, experience what’s actually there in front of us and reimagine a way through.
20.35: It seems throughout the collection you intended for obscurity, to juxtapose disparate elements together, to cause a sort of linguistic tension. Why was this relevant in Against Heaven? To me, it felt like the speaker had to rebel against language, too, since part of queer identity was to “blend” within the “normal,” to obscure the truth in plain sight.
Disorientation can move the reader from passive consumer to active participant, invited to connect new dots and reorient to a different set of expectations.
– Kemi Alabi
Kemi: The obscurity and tension weren’t primary intentions – but clarity and ease weren’t either. When asked, “How can abstract art be political?” painter Sam Gillam answered, “It messes with you. It convinces you that what you think isn’t all. It challenges you to understand something that is different. That a person can be just as good… If that’s your tradition of what you call figures, you don’t understand art anyway. Just because it looks like something that resembles you doesn’t mean you have an understanding. Why not open up?” As I mentioned before, disorientation can move one from passive consumer to active participant, connecting new dots, understanding that “what you think isn’t all.”
Shared sensemaking in a narrative sense isn’t the goal and perhaps isn’t even a possibility – especially as people who are made into abstractions by the dominant culture. How can abstraction be a tool to restore a stolen subjectivity? Visual artist Torkwase Dyson once wrote, “Surviving abstraction through abstraction is my environmental project today.” And in response to Dyson’s approach, Dionne Brand said, “Poetry is always abstract, even when it is narrative poetry. Or that part of poetry’s power is that the reader’s response is tangential to poetry, whereas it is crucial to narrative.” I love “Verso 3.3” of Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk:
The author scrapes and scrapes. A palimpsest. The old city resurfaces. Its old self, barely concealed, lifts its figure off the page, heaves deep sighs of bigotry. The beast will never die, the clerk breathes.
The taxi drivers know this. “Miss,” one of them says, “don’t talk about this city, I know this city. You come here thinking, you’ll do this for a year, maybe two, before you know it, it’s ten years. And what did I used to do, and what did I hope, I can’t tell you. I can’t talk about it. It’s no use.”
In the back of the cab a poet tries to sympathize. “I know, I know.”
“You don’t know, Miss.’
And I don’t. I do know that we are both only trying to make a way through life. We are not trying to make sense of it any longer. (Bold print added)
Sometimes we reach for language to know, to make and receive deposits of meaning. But what if we approached lyric poetry not for its sensemaking, but for its waythroughness? Music is a kind of waythroughness – I think of Jean-Michele Basquiat saying, “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time” – and I often go back to this interview with Fred Moten when he says, “I want to write poems that recognizably inhabit, but in some kind of underground or fugitive way, the space between the laws of music and the laws of meaning.” Then back to Terrance Hayes, who once said, “Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument. Language and breath.” When leaning into the laws of music and lyric knowledge, I experience the most delight, the most satisfaction, the truest way to say what I need to say. I have to transcend the limits of language, the limits of sensemaking, which the lyric lets me do. It’s important in this collection to understand English as a limit, language as a limit, the communicative mode as a limit, what’s “normal” as a limit, and reach for sound, pleasure, and embodiment as its own perfection, its own heaven.
20.35: In an interview with Trey Rhone, you said: “I am writing for the line. I’m writing one poem at a time. I’m writing for the loosey. I never even necessarily intended to write a book because I’m not a project book poet. I’m a practice-based poet. Finding the nice line is my next project. What am I up to next? I’m finding the line.” If these practice-based routines led to the poems that form Against Heaven, what are the routines of a practice-based poet if the poet is not writing towards a project, and how do these lines, in each poem, round up to give a sense of a full-length?
Kemi: I think it’s important to release all expectations when you get to the page. Again, if you believe the idea that a poem is a walk, then you open yourself to encounters, surprises – work you never expected. I think the routine is to show up to the page and surrender. Surrender to the fact that the next line you write may be wiser than you. Even when I think I know what I want to write – even now, when I have a book project in mind – my practice is still one of improvisation. It lends to a kind of creativity that is also a spiritual practice. It’s very important to me to see poetry as a function of time, not space, even when it’s on the page. I follow the surrealist tradition of autowrites, where I write without picking up my pen for a set amount of time. It allows one to access the unconscious mind. Samiya Bashir, my workshop leader at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, would lead us in autowrites prompted by three random words. These are my favorite ways to begin – with the spontaneous combustion of sound and time. Philosopher Byun Chul-Han wrote, “Poems are magic ceremonies of language. The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning. The poetic does not produce… in poems we enjoy language itself.” I try to protect that magic and pleasure with as much play as possible. But my favorite part is revision – another playful process of rediscovery and reconstruction. I can spend years revising. It requires one to be a good reader and listener of one’s own work, to tune into what it’s telling you, what it’s asking you. From here, the work tells you when it’s finished.
20.35: Despite its defiance against religious ideologies about power and queer desires, the collection highlights love as one tool for re-enacting or re-claiming power to the self. What’s the utilitarian role of love as a means or tool for demolishing preconceived, dogged dogmas around queerness?
Kemi: I don’t want to think of love as a means or a tool for anything. I want it to be an end in itself. I used to work for a big LGBT nonprofit during the fight for marriage equality in the US – a right I don’t particularly care about as someone who doesn’t believe in marriage, but I understand its social utility. Around that time, campaign strategists were using the slogan “love is love” to get straight allies on board. It never sat well with me. I think it assumes that queerness needs to be made more legible and respectable – needs to rise to a place of love that straightness supposedly already occupies. But love marriages are a relatively new invention. Heterosexuality is not defined by love. Social identities are power relationships, and heterosexuality has been a compulsory framework obscuring violence and domination with myths of natural law. I don’t think those who hate queerness are motivated by love. I think they’re motivated by fear – of judgment, social exclusion, the flexible bounds of desire, the unruliness of the erotic. I’m not interested in persuading the opposition. I just want to invite those who are ready to feel more, love more, live more to get free. In “After Kent State,” Lucille Clifton wrote, “white ways are / the way of death / come into the / Black / and live.” Yes, yes. Violence, hatred, and domination are the way of death. Come into the black and live. Come into the queer and live.
20.35: You have spoken about the influence of Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Terrance Hayes in your work. I am curious about other poets and/or thinkers who have influenced you. How would you trace the influences that have shaped your craft as poet and artist? How long have you considered yourself a writer, a poet?
Kemi: I’ve been writing poems since I was four or five – my mom still has an award I won for a poem I wrote in kindergarten. I’d carry around this anthology of children’s poetry that eventually fell apart, the cover ripped, spine completely worn down. I’ve always expressed myself through writing, and I was drawn to the lyricism of singer-songwriters as a young person. In high school, my creative writing teacher introduced me to Patricia Smith and other amazing poets that had mastered sound. When I discovered Yusef Komunyakaa in college, a whole other world opened up. There are hundreds of other poets, writers, thinkers, and artists that I owe my writing life to, but these two poets really blew the door open.
20.35: If you could construct a poet out of whole cloth, what attributes would you give them?
Kemi: Curiosity, patience, playfulness, honesty, self-acceptance, courage, embodiment.
20.35: Lastly, what books/poets have you been excited to read in the past year and why? Are there any poets or writers whose books you are looking forward to in the coming months or year?
Kemi: I read mostly prose this past year and highly recommend Johanna Hedva’s How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom for its sharp writing and timely subjects. Really looking forward to Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth and I.S. Jones’ Bloodmercy.
Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, among other honors. Alabi’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, the Grammy-nominated album Difficult Grace, and elsewhere.
Alabi is co-editor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021), an anthology of Black reproductive justice writing. They’ve spent over a decade building narrative power for trans and queer bodily autonomy, most recently as Head of Creativity & Impact of the reproductive justice organization Forward Together. Alabi is the 2024-2025 Feminist in Residence at Northwestern University and Beloit Poetry Journal’s Inaugural Iron Mouth Curatorial Fellow. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.