Les Portes

Meredith Nnoka is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (O, Miami, 2023) and A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music (C&R Press, 2016). Nnoka holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

“Written from within a blessedly unfinished and particular life, Les Portes is a tender meditation on intimacy, survival, the violent ‘history available to repeat,’ and how we might, nonetheless, reach toward each other. Moving from the child’s doomed certainty of the gendered harm she will inherit, to the enclosing repetitions of queer domestic abuse, to the woman’s flight away into ‘the bright world again / carrying every year of [her] life in [her] hands,’ this searching debut allows us to witness a voice wrestling with form in order to come honestly into its own. I am grateful to this poet for her honesty, her opacity, her directness, her ambivalence, her arrival, not at closure, but at more openness to questions about how to desire a future absent of harm—after we ‘break apart, shatter, / melt down the very machinery’—while living on in a world, a self, so thoroughly shaped by it. That is, this is the kind of book I find myself reaching for these days, one that helps me to feel something new about how to live, as we all do, in the aftermath—the aftermath of our personal traumas and losses and leavings, the aftermath of the racist/heteropatriarchal order that gives them form.” —Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of An Optimism“Meredith Nnoka is a poet of daring ethical imagination. Through language at once elegant in syntax and jagged in emotional truth, Les Portes excavates ‘an unknown history of fire’ in order to move closer to ‘something like love.’ To understand harm, its origins, and how to address it, Nnoka is not satisfied to examine only the self or the immediate other; she must investigate whole family histories as well as the power structures built around race, gender, and queerness. But never does she forget the everyday scale at which intimate partner violence occurs—nor how a single illuminating image can push toward another life possibility. What an expansive and unforgettable debut.” —Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency"Les Portes is a book we all must take into the next phase of humanity, of history. Nnoka’s way of truth telling is so alive, so patient and precise, I feel almost immobilized. I recognize all these thoughts and feelings—I have not been alone. This poet’s knife work cuts it all open, incisive, bloodletting. I breathe this living truth all in, poem by poem, and even though 'we’re not safe yet'—I feel such hope blooming in my blood. Yes." —Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum "At once haunting and refreshingly uplifting, the poems in this small, powerful volume invite readers into the space where love, pain, and desire meet resistance and hope. Nnoka is a beautiful writer whose body of work centers on a clear analysis of harm in queer relationships, while revealing the complex space between self soothing and surrender. The poems are graceful and generative and will seep into the heart of readers from start to finish." —Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now."Nnoka’s poetry is the contribution I did not know was missing from what I and others sometimes mark as abolition feminism, or our collective experiments that demand the world do the work to end forms of impersonal violence without deepening the carceral state." —Erica Meiner, from the introduction