Kabal grew up in a small rural town and spent years being told to stay quiet. The Seattle poet and storyteller has released MOUTHY — a spoken-word EP streaming now on all platforms — with a companion poetry book of the same name set to follow. The two formats form a single body of work, not a release and a tie-in.
“I didn’t want a quiet release,” Kabal says. “This work is about taking up space. The book holds the words. The EP holds the voice. Together, they tell the full story.”
The decision to release both simultaneously was deliberate. Kabal developed the EP as an independent extension of the book rather than a promotional supplement — audio for listeners who connect to poetry through sound and breath as much as through language on a page. The recordings carry the weight of pause and emphasis alongside the words themselves. For audiences who access poetry primarily through listening, that distinction matters.
MOUTHY draws on Kabal’s experience as a queer, Black, fat, chronically ill artist. The work moves through memory, body, joy, and anger — through the long effects of shame and self-erasure, and through what it takes to speak anyway. Fat liberation, chronic illness, queer and Black identity, and joy as deliberate resistance all run through the project. None of it arrives at easy resolution. The work sits with what it costs to take up space when the world has spent considerable effort discouraging you from doing so.
Yet the project does not read — or sound — like a document of suffering alone. Softness and survival sit alongside the harder material. Kabal has described MOUTHY as the beginning of a larger creative body of work spanning literature, audio, and live performance.
The MOUTHY EP is available now on all major streaming platforms. The book release date has not yet been announced.
