The Machine Code of the Bleeding Moon

<p>In <em>The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon</em> 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.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Latif Askia Ba is the Virgil of cyborg poetics. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p>-The Cyborg Jillian Weise</p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Part seer part seeker; part jester part jazz riff Ba is a gentleman fugitive from the laws of gravity and convention</span><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 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. </span><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>-Timothy Donnelly</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>A dazzling meander through lexicons of bodies and technologies </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon</em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> 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. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>-B.K. Fischer</span></p><p> </p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>-Cynthia Cruz</p>