Reviews

Against Heaven: Poems by Kemi Alabi

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airheadxt's review

emotional hopeful informative inspiring fast-paced

4.75

For National Poetry Month, it’s a given to read poetry. I love the latest collection from the American Poets First Book Award. The variety of style makes each poem unique and a separate journey. I loved this body of work. It’s worth revisiting every year.

greeniezona's review

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challenging emotional reflective

4.5

jayisreading's review

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

This was an incredibly smart and powerful debut collection. I wasn’t expecting many of these poems to be so spiritual, but it was lovely seeing a recognition of Blackness and queerness as being sacred. I think it’s safe to say that Alabi’s poems may have been a little too clever for me, as I didn’t fully grasp the meaning of everything. On another note (and somewhat related), there is no other way to describe how incredible it was that Alabi included not one but several golden shovel poems (and some being double golden shovels). The use of golden shovels alone demonstrated their control over language, though this was evident in many of their other poems. I found that I drifted especially towards the more experimental ones, for example. Really, I was completely enthralled with the way they played with form in their poems.

Even if I had some trouble following the meaning behind some of these poems, I really do look forward to whatever Alabi publishes next.

Some favorites: “Love Letter from Pompeii,” “The Virus,” “The Lonely Dream in Fevers,” “you must believe in spring,” “Against Heaven” (double golden shovel with Sade and Belinda Carlisle), and “A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes”

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