Before I crack the spine of Meredith Nnoka’s award-winning debut collection Les Portes, I must take out the tiny computer in my pocket. I don’t know French, nor do I trust myself to translate even this cognate once so recognizable to me. Unbeknownst to me at this early stage of reading, Les Portes—”the gate” in English—is all about trust: the trust we put in ourselves to “know harm…when it lands before me / like birds in an open field”; the trust we have in others to not pass their harms on to us despite “unending warnings / about the lives women lead, / our vulnerabilities and capacities” and the “disbelief / that compromises every inch of our armor.
Les Portes is a collection of poetry in English, organized into 3 sections titled, like the whole, in French: “Le Debút” (the beginning); “Le Passé” (the past); “Le Present” (the present). As a poet, I am deeply attuned to the paratextual elements of a text— what other readers might move over quickly or read as incidental—because I know, for a poet, everything about a book is intentional.
Nnoka’s choice to couch some of the book’s meaning in the gendered language of French strikes me as fitting hand-in-glove with the book’s overall themes of gender, gendered harms, and harmful inheritances. As a high schooler learning Spanish, I remember obsessing on the notion of a gendered grammatical system of language, a system where nouns have a gender, but that gender is not connected to any kind of real-world quality. Looking back, I’m struck by how nonchalant my high school Spanish teacher—a conservative Christian who made that part of his identity known in big and small ways in our small public high school—was in teaching us this characteristic of the language, considering the oddness of assigning gender to a car or a chair or a lemon (and yet, he could not fathom a gender-nonconforming teen in his classroom).
I’m still fascinated today: Le portes is gendered feminine, while le debut, le passé, and le present are gendered masculine; gates are feminine, the passage of time masculine. Are we to believe there is no connection between the gender of the word for gate and the meaning of gate, which is threshold? We are to believe that there is no connection between the gender of time and the words used to mark the passage of time?
Les Portes facilitates what may otherwise be that missed connection, constituting the major thrust of the book, which is to make known what is otherwise obscured. The order of the sections (beginning, past, present) is not quite chronological, a nod to the queering of time the poems bring into relief. Too, the bilingual experience of reading Les Portes requires that readers do some translation work, and not just in the traditional sense of figuring out what a word means when it’s not in one’s native vocabulary. Here, we must contemplate translation as an act of learning what is unknown, and re-knowing what is forgotten.
Like the English speaker unaccustomed to the gendered grammatical system of another language, readers of Les Portes may find Nnoka’s scrutiny of gendered violence in queer relationships between women unfamiliar. Indeed, it is rare to read an account of violence between women, rarer still to read from the perspective of a Black queer woman: “In any direction, no safe house exists for women / who run from other women.” We have not been socialized to see queer relationships as legitimate, and certainly not conditioned to recognize and legitimate the violence that takes place within queer relationships: “They believe somehow / that we are not as dangerous, that cannot do / the same damage to each other that our violence / must be a fair fight.” The title of the poem in which these lines live is “Queering,” or that act of uncovering a text’s queer subtext, theme, or character. If we add “A” to the title, we get something akin to “A Haunting,” which also tracks. Nnoka’s collection reveals the specter of gendered harm in our community.
“Queering” (and queering) shortens the distance between the reader and the shadowy violence in relationships between women, and I revel in it as a gay woman who has experienced violence at the hand of another gay woman. In “Blessing,” the speaker describes a spectrum of harms perpetrated, from “women / who left their abuser in time” to women “whose only choice / was to survive / and receive punishment,” , and in doing so, legitimizes the full range of gendered harms experienced by queer women. Here, Nnoka is doing what I think of has harm translation, through language, through genes (“Epigenetics”; “The Origins of Harm”; “Foremothers”), through the material (“Inheritance”; “The One Before Me”). Reading these poems, the survivor in me almost folds in a bend of gratitude for a poetic so willing to ask, as the speaker does in “No One Deserves What’s Been Done to My bloodline,” “What do I do with the harm already inflicted?” , and then wait for the resonances, echo as they may.
POETRY
Les Portes
By Meredith Nnoka
Autumn House Press
Published April 28, 2026
