Join Brooklyn Poets for the launch of poet Ashna Ali's debut collection of poems, The Relativity of Living Well, on Friday, November 1, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Theo LeGro and I.S. Jones will open for Ali. Book signing to follow.
Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at [email protected].
About The Relativity of Living Well
The Relativity of Living Well by Ashna Ali traces the dynamic between personal and collective struggle and grief. Chronicling the mitigation years of pandemic through an increasingly hostile geopolitical present, Ali’s poems document their journey as they grow increasingly disabled and untethered from the American Dream that brought them to the United States, offering a generous intimacy in the fog of ongoing crisis.
By turns playful and deadly serious, the poems’ emotional and political landscapes interweave to hold space for joy among dissociation, medical struggle, as well as the tensions of complicity and resistance inherent to life as a queer postcolonial subject in America.
About the Author
Ashna Ali is a queer and disabled child of the Bangladeshi diaspora raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn. They are the author of The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024) and the Substack PAIN BABY, where they explore the intersections of queer and disability justice, diasporic arts, politics and poetry. Their work has been published or is forthcoming from Indiana Review, Nat. Brut. Zoegloss, the Margins and beyond. They hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from CUNY Graduate Center, were recently admitted to Randolph College's MFA program and serve as poetry editor at Epiphany. They live in Kensington, Brooklyn with their hairless feline familiar, Kubo Avatar.
About the Opening Acts
Eduardo Martinez-Leyva was born in El Paso, TX to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Boston Review, Adroit, Best New Poets and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Cowboy Park, won the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press this November.
Theo LeGro is a queer Vietnamese-American poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. Their work appears or will appear in Blood Orange Review, Brooklyn Poets, diode, Honey Literary, Plume, the Offing, Raleigh Review and others. They live in Brooklyn with a cat named Vinny.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus and elsewhere. Since 2019, she has served as an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, the longest running anthology for living African poets. Currently, I.S. is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest where she runs her column, The Legacy Suite, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name, selected for their Emerging Poets Series, was published with Newfound in 2021. She is the 2024 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium where she is at work on her debut collection of poems.