In ways both forthright and nuanced, and with a nod to her African heritage, The Unmooring is a voyage into race and metaphysics, love and loss. Troubling the edges of identity and otherness, The Unmooring is a book that opens the floodgates of the self, revealing the various watershed moments that concurrently force us to enter what we are estranged from, and renounce the anchors we no longer need.

Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka. She is the author of three previous full-length poetry books to date: Ex Nihilo, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Terra Incognita, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and The Unmooring. A poem from The Unmooring was featured in the 2019 Poem-In-Your-Pocket anthology, co-created by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets. Adebe served as the 2019-20 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence with Twelve Literary Arts (Cleveland, Ohio) and was selected by Sonia Sanchez as the winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. She lives in Toronto.

Adebe DeRango-Adem's profile page

Praise for Adebe DeRango-Adem

"Adebe's poetics are indebted to the vast, endless range of her interlocking identities. The poet's work is beautifully political, inimitabaly poignant, as it moves us to recognize Truth."
- George Elliott Clarke

"Adebe speaks to us through an ocean, suspending the reader in a paradoxical compression of intimate buoyancy. In The Unmooring the poet has salvaged and reconstructed a wisdom that plays as a fluid brea(d)th between knowings, identities, and shores."
- Liz Howard

"The grace of thought borne in loss veils these works in suffused light and in the mirror of lyric necessity."
- Charles Bernstein