Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Semiotics: Poems
    Semiotics: Poems
    Semiotics: Poems
    Ebook82 pages33 minutes

    Semiotics: Poems

    By Chekwube Danladi

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The poems in Chekwube Danladi’s debut collection ardently expose unnamed spaces of agency, proclaiming power and beauty through an unaccustomed yearning. Semiotics contends with the thresholds, eagerly transgressing the limits of material and spiritual realms in pursuit of personal and collective liberation. These poems negotiate a captive erotic condition and augur a hesitant yet lush embodiment, unearthing a Black femininity preoccupied with retrieving its unfettered freedom by any means. Activating a many-layered language that is at once political and delicate, Danladi conjures the unsightly and the sacred across poems that are vigilant, penetrating, and deeply evocative.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2020
    ISBN9780820358116
    Semiotics: Poems
    Author

    Chekwube Danladi

    CHEKWUBE DANLADI is a writer and a reformed punk. She has received support from Callaloo, Kimbilio, Hedgebrook, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her chapbook, Take Me Back, was published in the series New-Generation African Poets. She lives in Chicago.

    Related to Semiotics

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2022

      If I call myself unlovable, I am, practically; if I say itenough times: unlovable. Then, like practical magic, I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.I’m a long, mean package, a terror-dyke, a nag, a squinting, slut-spun hag—it’s easy, really

      5 min read

    • Article

      Haunts

      Jul 26, 2022

      Haunts
      7 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • Article

      All This Blood and Love

      Nov 22, 2017

      All This Blood and Love
      6 min read

    • Article

      Reports From Near And Far

      Nov 25, 2021

      susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles t

      17 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium On The Mysterious

      Sep 1, 2023

      A Symposium On The Mysterious
      24 min read

    • Article

      From Cantares Mexicanos

      Dec 1, 2023

      Last night I dreamt that I was employed as a suicide prevention specialist in ancient Mesoamerica. We had no phones then so no hotline to call or anything like that. I held these gatherings going place to place for people to tell me their stories and

      3 min read

    • Article

      Rooted

      May 10, 2019

      Rooted
      9 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Wisdom for The Future

      Dec 20, 2021

      Wisdom for The Future
      10 min read

    • Article

      Where Is Black Life Lived?

      Jul 21, 2020

      Where Is Black Life Lived?
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Letter to My Sons

      Sep 25, 2019

      A Letter to My Sons
      7 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • Article

      Learning To Walk

      Oct 28, 2019

      Learning To Walk
      5 min read

    • Article

      Seven Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Seven Poems
      2 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      May 1, 2023

      Great One, Maker, Weaver of Things, I want to undress the tree to find you hidden there in the layers of sapwood, as you were hidden in a mango I ate today, its sweet and buttery flesh. A fly entered the house through the front door. Was that you? At

      3 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Point?

      Sep 23, 2019

      What’s the Point?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Notes From A Nothing

      Feb 14, 2020

      Notes From A Nothing
      13 min read

    • Article

      Bundles

      Feb 15, 2021

      Bundles
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Semiotics

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Semiotics - Chekwube Danladi

      GHAZAL WITH OPEN THROAT

      The libations flowed, but the ancestors refused to part their lips for it. Yet,

      when withheld, they drowned in their absence dreams for generations to come.

      When she touches my       I ask her to call it my       so dreaming doesn’t stop.

      The sound getting sutured to birth again, affirmed until time’s choice comes.

      Meaning to tempt with a tamer claim, these days I ask only for the very least.

      The beef is with selfhood, how pleasure gets made carceral for nights to come.

      When she calls me         I ask her to say which          is closer to real meaning.

      Since claiming absence as a desperate purity, keeping it casual comes true.

      When called home, I say: I don’t know her. I ain’t even from here, yet I roll

      through your hood so polite even your ma thinks it’s to her porch I’ve come.

      When she parts my what flutters hardens as to sustain my ills. The body’s

      boldest tricks fool even the fooler, utters the fool when a full mouth comes.

      It’s inherited, this desire to press cuffs to wrists, command you my captor.

      Preemptive authority, so when the call sounds, I’m under no orders to come.

      DEAD WORSHIP

      I ask that you deify your evenings           or form a new theory: antimemory,

      where each new doing means to counter what was left to recall, looping

      over and over into—perhaps—new self-conduct rules (such as: don’t spend night

      more than twice a week) or forsake all the blood that vacates as traitor,

      abandoner. To think more seriously of taking your mama’s advice and bring in

      your dried clothes, your shoes, since when left out for the night, no spirit will

      wonder where you are but will come direct to your door   kor-kor   knocking,

      calling out to you by name:   chekwubeolisa  I am your antecedent

      come now to guide you home.       Saved again from a new taboo.

      So advised to thank the darkened realm, granting your continued transit

      every time lumbering to bed from elsewhere or elsewho. To have used so much

      another body for passage, yet forgotten to commemorate the proto-memory.

      Sssst. Zo mana, let us go. Called out by the angle of the dark hour. Ekwensu

      is also called the god of bargains, which is why he colors the night black.

      BLACK LAGOON

      I have yet to taste either

      salt water whole nor

      inland dry—tongue

      bleating as horrid as each May’s torrent—

      nor slum battered, stilt village,

      sore jointed. Where Portuguese tongues

      took solace in cuckoldry, one

      cartography subdued, bubbling beneath

      another. The Atlantic’s edge drawn in,

      soft as a negrita’s moan.

      Shore swollen with bloat, frothy with

      the sky’s erotic. All of the land is ready,

      eager for the captive tautology:

      straighten, lighten, brittle, unbecome.

      The native tongue’s final task

      to suckle loose one more

      tamarind seed, evidence of

      this committed curse,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1