breathing exercises
we are born borderless until we touch.

Sudanese-Nubian poet · sound
the vertigo of living
k.eltinaé is a diaspora poet of Sudanese-Nubian and Mediterranean descent, whose work is centered around otherness, cultural/geographic displacement, generational trauma, and exile. His work has appeared in Poetry International, International Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Mizna, The African American Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. His debut collection The Moral Judgement of Butterflies won The Beverly Prize for International Literature 2019 (BSPG Press) and also the Eyelands Book Award 2022 under the Published Poetry category. He is a World Literature lecturer and part-time Soul/Funk/Afrobeat Disc jockey residing in Granada, Spain.
His debut collection, The Moral Judgement of Butterflies, won the International Beverly Prize and was named a finalist for the Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Alongside the page, he performs as DJ Qahli — folding Sudanese sound, diaspora rhythm, and the night into a second voice.
Black Spring Press Group · 2022
A debut that maps exile as a kind of weather — poems of homeland and distance, of the body remembering what the map forgets.

i want to hold the truth between us to survive love without running.k.eltinaé
Fragments from the page — exile, language, and the long argument with home.
we are born borderless until we touch.
we were born to chase our truths in transit.
the wind scatters my tears, laughs like a djinn in the fields. when they bloom.
sometimes if you look hard enough at something it will bloom in your eyes & make countries for refugees no one took in.

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