It Is Abnormal

It Is Abnormal to Live This Way, Dara Kalima delivers a searing collection of poems that confront the relentless pressures placed on Black bodies and Black lives. From childhood memories in the Bronx to the national spectacle of state violence, Kalima documents the emotional, physical, and psychological toll of living in a world that demands endurance while offering little relief. Her poems move with the force of testimony-sharp, vivid, and unwilling to look away from the realities so many are forced to navigate.

Kalima writes through depression, rage, love, caregiving, and the constant negotiation of safety. She captures the intimate moments that shape a life-small humiliations, private fears, inherited wounds-alongside the collective grief of watching names become hashtags and tragedies become headlines. Yet within the heaviness, she carves out space for joy, humor, sensuality, and the quiet brilliance of community. The result is a portrait of survival that is as complex as it is courageous.

Unapologetic and deeply human, It Is Abnormal to Live This Way is both a mirror and a call to action. It challenges readers to witness, to feel, and to reckon with the systems we've normalized. This is poetry that stays with you long after the final page.