8 Disabled & Chronically Ill Poets to Read for Disability Pride Month

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Laura Sackton is a lifelong reader, author, and lover of made up worlds. She lives in rural Massachusetts together with her candy pup, and collectively they’re decided to discover each good swimming gap inside an hour’s drive. She runs a tiny cookie enterprise out of her house kitchen, and spends the remainder of her time studying and writing about queer books. You can hear all about her favorites in her e-newsletter, Books & Bakes.

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July is Disability Pride Month, which implies, like the opposite 11 months of the 12 months, it’s a good time to delve into incapacity lit! I’ve fallen in love with the work of so many disabled poets through the years, and I look ahead to discovering many extra throughout this month and past.

These eight poets are just some of the various, many disabled poets I really like. Some of their work is about incapacity, but it surely’s additionally about queerness, parenthood, nature, grief, work, relationships — in different phrases, all of the human stuff. I’ve included poets with in depth backlists in addition to poets whose work has been anthologized or largely seems on-line. There are so many alternative methods to learn! Even should you’re not within the temper for an entire guide of poetry, these poets are nonetheless value trying out. Try studying a poem in your lunch break, together with your morning espresso, or aloud to your companion or roommate or buddy after dinner.

If you’re enthusiastic about incapacity poetry and also you’re trying for a complete introduction to disabled poets (each previous and current), Beauty is a Verb is a unbelievable anthology, and one I extremely suggest for poetry followers and newcomers alike.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s nonfiction books (Care Work and The Future is Disabled) will at all times be my private favorites, however, fortunately for poetry followers, they’re a prolific writer throughout many genres! They’ve written a number of poetry books, together with Bodymap and Tonguebreaker, each of that are stunning, visceral, weak collections about incapacity, art-making, being a survivor, queer femme of shade kinship, and extra.

cover of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound

torrin a. greathouse

I’m not a favorites individual, but when compelled to select my favourite poetry assortment I’ve learn thus far this 12 months, it could be Wound from the Mouth of a Wound. This is a shocking debut, filled with language and imagery so deft and stunning that I usually discovered myself studying strains time and again and over, simply to savor the gorgeous shock of claiming them out loud. Greathouse writes about her trans and disabled physique with exceptional care and precision and curiosity. There is a lot pleasure and mess on this assortment.

Qwo-Li Driskill

Qwo-Li Driskill is a Cherokee Two-Spirit author and scholar. They’ve edited a number of anthologies of Indigenous and Two-Spirit literature, together with the unbelievable Sovereign Erotics. They are additionally a poet whose work explores queerness, mixed-race and Indigenous identification, the legacies of ongoing colonial violence, belonging, and histories of resistance and activism. In addition to a number of chapbooks, I extremely suggest their assortment Walking With Ghosts.

Raymond Antrobus

British Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus has printed two collections that may reside rent-free in my head ceaselessly: The Perseverance and All the Names Given. Both discover themes of language, translation, Deafness and Deaf tradition, parenthood, household legacies, historical past, immigration, and silence. Antrobus performs with type and language in ways in which really feel frequently new. Reading his poems seems like entering into a brand new world.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

I don’t assume it’s a shock that so many poets additionally write different kinds of books — poetry takes so many alternative kinds! Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s two books each defy style categorization. Knot Body is a group of poems, letters, meditations, essays, and reminiscences about friendship and love, queer and trans pleasure, being sick, Arab identification, and an entire lot extra. The Good Arabs is a equally fantastic style explosion, mixing the strains between fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose.

Jason Purcell

Jason Purcell’s debut full-length assortment is a mix of playful and heartbreaking. It is usually involved with queerness and sickness. Like lots of the poets on this listing, they write so fantastically and with such tenderness about our bodies. I can’t wait to see what they write subsequent, and within the meantime, I’m keen to take a look at their chapbook, A Place More Hospitable.

Jillian Weise

If you’re trying for a poet with a physique of labor you may actually dig into, you can’t go improper with Jillian Weise. Her debut assortment, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, explores the historical past of incapacity and incapacity illustration, responding to and refuting the still-too-common depiction of disabled folks as sexless and with out want. Her many subsequent books (together with The Book of Goodbyes and Cyborg Detective) proceed to discover these themes, grappling with cyborg identification, expertise, ableism, intercourse and desirability, relationships, and extra.

Camisha L. Jones

Camisha L. Jones is the writer of the chapbook Flare, which attracts from her experiences with listening to loss and power ache. It explores the contradictions of dwelling in a physique, the realities of ableism and stigma surrounding invisible disabilities, and extra. Her work has additionally appeared in publications resembling The Deaf Poets Society, and you may learn a few of her (beautiful!) poems on poets.org.

Looking for extra sensible incapacity poetry? Check out Kendra’s glorious listing of disabled poets (I informed you there have been so many greater than those on this listing). You’ll additionally discover some poets on this nice listing of 2SLGBTQ+ disabled authors.