1. Autobiographies

2. Granny Is The Revolution

3. Blood

4. My Self Portrait #1 (After Adam Zagajewski

5. What The Bullet Said

6. Goodbye To The Gods

7. The Garden (Where My Sister Used To See Me)

8. Family Time

9. Boogie On, My Darling (For Bridget)

10. Fuck A Brain

11. Stone Soup Bones

12. Detroit Dream World 1 - 4

13. Community Service Blues

14. Laid Off At the Laugh Factory (for Michael Richards)



Artist Statement:

Mourning is an inconvenient life-giving necessity. It is painful, yet oh so important, to mourn, to allow your world to break with recognition of what has moved along, what has been loved and lost. Even as the world seems to go on as if nothing has happened. My poetry hopes to open a space for healing within these cracks in so-called normality. You’ll find here speculative worlds, surrealism, musicality, metaphysics. I hope that my attempts to poem the vulnerability I need gives you something valuable also.


About the Poet:

Owólabi Aboyade is a multidimensional father/ essayist/ poet/ critic/hip hop artist (Will See Music) from Detroit. His poetry chapbook, Lee, Young Lee was published by AWE Society Press in 2024. He is a contributor to Riverwise, Geez, Therapeutic Edgelands, and Against The Current magazines. Working with his partner, sculptor and indie publisher Bridget Quinn, he is text editor of Bullet*Train, a magazine chronicling Detroit’s revolutionary culture and making meaning, a zine for people with chronic illness. He’s currently working on collapse, collected essays about grief, culture, and family in gentrifying Detroit.



Owólabi has been named a Tin House Resident as well as a Radical Imagination Fellow for advancing Detroit’s culture of racial justice via arts. He is a community partner of the abolitionist collective Motor City Mobile Wellness and has been navigating kidney failure and the medical industry since 1990. He is a Kwame Dawes Mapmaker Fellow in Pacific University’s nonfiction MFA program (class of 2025).

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