Additional information
by Meredith Nnoka (Author), Erica Meiners (Introduction by)
Winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Cameron Awkward-Rich, and named a "Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026" by Ms. Magazine, Les Portes traces how harm against women and femmes takes root, recurs, and reshapes itself across generations.
Unfolding in three movements--Le Début, Le Passé, and Le Présent--all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral.In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: "Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?" Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.
Author Biography
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.
