Les Portes

Meredith Nnoka (they/she) 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