reading Saturday July 13th, 3PM EST (featured readers Saba Keramati and Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi)

Join us tomorrow for the seventh installment of the 'I Think I Can't Speak for Everyone Here' reading series.

Reading will be held over Zoom at 3PM EST.

Contact bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the Zoom meeting room info and to sign-up for the open mic.

Info on the readers:

Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. She is also the poetry editor for Sundog Lit.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa multidisciplinary artist, poet, and a licenced Medical Laboratory Scientist from Bobi. She is the author of the chapbook Cadaver of Red Roses (winner of the 2023 Derricotte/Eady Prize) and winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022 and the first beneficiary of Carolyn Micklem Scholarship. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Daily, Agbowo, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Uncensored Snapshots is forthcoming with Chestnut Review (April/June 2025). She is active on X @ZainabBobi.  

Recent reflections I had toward the work of the featured readers:

Self-Mythology
poems, Saba Keramati
The University of Arkansas Press, 2024

Alive to the moment, but also beautifully dying in the perceived past of passage, Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology is an adult prayer of verse offered to the childish angel’s extra ghost. By which I mean it knows the black speech of plenty is lacking, and that language is a body no god can cut in half. If it left me speechless, it also silenced me in the looking. Keramati has an eye that interrogates vision with both image and with the after that image denies hallucinating within. Tanks carry the same indifference everywhere, and violence makes a glistening listener of the unheard weapon. It’s a very born thing. And a thing that hatches in the space the egg dreams it has reserved. It hurts, heals. Blood turns to blood from seeing salt.

~

Cadaver Of Red Roses
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
O, Miami (2024)

In the elegantly wrestled verse of Cadaver of Red Roses, poet Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi takes actual place and actual thing as a gift and re-gifts them as a fair and brutal math, a hungry and clawed-at grammar, a headlining and interrupted voice. Its anger illuminates hallucinations that are ever-present, and its peace reverses ritual might its purple prayer leave a mark looked for by a bruise. It says yes, and so what, and it sings home using the notes of the seriously remote. So sing, so look. Keep pace. Its portals have softspots for the void.