Reviewed by Michael Northen
Content Warning: Eugenics
When Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and I edited Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability in 2011, one of the first writers to contact us was Australian poet Andy Jackson. At the time, Jackson expressed the wish that Australian writers had a similar anthology. Jackson has gone on to become well known among the Australian disabled poetry community through such books as Among the Regulars and Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold, as well as collaboration and support of other writers through a multitude of projects. In 2025, Jackson teamed up with writers Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying to edit Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability.
Raging Grace is not an imitation of Beauty is a Verb or its British counterpart Stairs and Whispers. Other than being the product of a trio of editors, the Australian anthology is a totally different animal. As Jackson explains in his foreword, the anthology came about as a result of a Writing the Future of Health fellowship that he received from RMIT University’s Health Transformation Lab. His focus was to be on collaborative writing about health. After asking Ottaway and Shying to come aboard as co-editors, Jackson then had to select as diverse a group of disabled writers to collaborate with as possible. As Ottaway describes:
The Zoom meetings we held to create these works were extraordinary. We were battling to be present: during the meetings people had blood sugar attacks, migraines, vertigo, panic attacks, suffered through pain, left the screen to warm up heat packs and take medications, and attended while lying down. (p. 5)
Needless to say, this work resulted in an unconventional anthology. Most – though not all – of the pieces included have more than one author. It is a purposeful pushback against an Australian society that the editors view as individualistic and hyper-capitalistic. While the anthology contains both prose and poetry (as well as hybrid genres), prose writing predominates.
This emphasis on collaboration rather than individualistic effort can be gleaned from a look at the table of contents. Titles are listed but no individual authors. It is not quite a “death of the author” assertion, though. Those who contributed to each piece are listed at the end of the piece itself, and, recognizing that readers may take a particular fancy to certain pieces and want to follow up by reading more work from that writer, an “Index to work by author” is provided at the end of the book. A look at the list of “Contributors” also provides a glimpse of the wide variation among the writers involved.
The anthology’s organization is free-range, with clusters of pieces centered on the two words in the title: grace (as in “Grace: The Unplanned” and “Grace: How Was Your Day”) and rage (“Rage: Living Invisible” and “Rage: Metacritic Oath”). While there is overlapping, the “grace” writings are prose pieces whose focus tends to be on the addressing of present needs in the future including making training in narrative medicine compulsory for doctors, genuinely listening to disabled women and greater research in perimenopause and menopause, attention to day-to-day needs, gender-affirming care as a right, and attention to basic daily survival needs. Though infused with anger, the writing also tends toward optimism. In “Grace: Inching” the only poem of this group, Jasper Peach says:
Futureproofing health outcomes seems like folly,
a farce. But – when we look behind us the gains
are exquisite….An inch is so much – a piano key, a kindness,
equality and access, understanding, safety.
Even if I don’t see it (and I won’t), it will be worth it. (p. 106)
The pieces that constitute the rage thread also consider the future of health care but from a generally angrier point of view. Some of the topics they address are concern with the use of genetics, lack of accommodation for the adult future of disabled children, use of technology to sell and make money off of data from disabled patients, lack of research on autism among women, and audience expectations in performance. In short, these works try to counter the current tendencies toward “normalization” rather than providing for and incorporating differences. As Ron Bateman points out in “Rage: Invisible (In)divisible”:
As I age, my status as a sexual being, my embodiment as a desiring subject as a result of acquired disabilities, both visible and invisible, cast me into the shadowy hinterland of being ignored. (p. 104)
It is a theme that runs through much of the work of the anthology.
While the impetus for Raging Grace was collaboration and a forefronting of concerns around the future of health for disabled Australians, Shying remarks In her “Foreword,” “When I reflect on the works in this collection, what stands out to me, even more than their intelligence, cogency and craft, is how creative they are. How extraordinarily creative.” That creativity is manifest throughout Raging Grace. Though singling out just a few examples from a collaborative corpus may seem contradictory, it also provides potential readers with a glimpse of what they can expect if they open the book themselves.
Just the appearance of the poem, “how do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the ‘normal’“ (p. 25) by Gaele Sobott and Andy Jackson is likely to attract readers’ attention. Structured as a double helix, the poem contains two strands (one in Italics, one not) that intertwine and invite readers to follow and decode its message. That message is a concern for the way in which geneticists by “a snip here/ a snip/ there” can make a decision to physically alter any life that they consider:
/deformed
deviant/
dirty unworthy of/
life (p. 26)
Like many of the anthology’s prose selections, the poem is a critique of “a fierce kink in/ systems fixated upon fixes.”
A set of three poems by Kerri Shying, Gaele Sobott, and Robin M. Eames that deserve credit for originality are designated criptychs. In contrast to the static image associated with a triptych, each of these poems portrays a different ride in a wheelchair. Each with a different setting has its own sense of speed. The middle panel, “Criptych: Wheeling the Sticky Delicious,” is an irreverent Whitmanesque burlesque filled with puns, onomatopoeia, and changes of speed that make it, as the last line says, “one hell of a ride.” (p. 101)
Less playful but more enigmatic is “Questing Beast,” a series of poems by Michèle Saint-Yves and Robin M. Eames built around an initial visual image, a collaged “beast” in a wheelchair. Each of the six poems references a different aspect of the beast. The poems vary in texture but all begin with an Italicized etymological derivation and convey a gothic, subterranean feel.
A little closer to lived experience but equally chilling is Jasper Peach and Rachael Winona Guy’s “Selections of Memory from Double Pneumonia / Selections of Memory from the Psych Ward.” The authors walk us through how it feels to be incarcerated by the medical establishment. For American readers it will be interesting to compare their experiences with the Australian systems with those portrayed by Stephanie Heit in her recent book Psych Murders, about healthcare in the United States. Of the two, Peach and Guy’s piece ends on the more hopeful note.
Despite running counter to the cooperative spirit of Raging Grace, it seems unjust to not acquaint American writers with at least one anthology poet whose work makes an exceptional impression. For me, that was the work of Esther Ottaway. Though not well known in the United States, Ottaway’s bio reveals her to be the winner of multiple Australian poetry prizes, the widely anthologized co-editor of the Australian Poetry Journal, and the author of several books, her last being, She Doesn’t Seem Autistic. Her short poem, “After writing a book on female autism, I decide to bury it,” in many ways reflects both the impulses and fears of the readers in the anthology:
Go on with that public Esther, curated pretense:
to be and not to be, that is Australian.
What good are these chalk traces around spent victims?
Why lift the sheet on myself, fatigued, confounded?
I know what I’d be next: that bleating woman,
the blaring car alarm that barely registers.
Truth-pregnant, I laboured. Her name is Repercussions.
My fear: that this child kicks, draws breath to cry. (p. 88)
In his “Foreword” to Raging Grace, Andy Jackson confesses, “I’ve always been a soloist” but adds “This project has been transformative for me as a writer, a workshop facilitator, and as a human. I wrote things I would never have written alone.” It is a transformation that should be taken to heart by disabled writers in the United States, a country that, particularly in its current state, is being driven increasingly backward into an ethic of individualism and overcoming instead of forward in cooperation and building. Raging Grace gives us an anthology of writing that, contrary to popular conception, can be both a communal act of problem solving and a source of literary creativity. It is hard to imagine a disabled writer who will not feel a kinship with many of the pieces found within this collection. It provides a source of creativity for those who write and an introduction to a whole new community of writers, one that expands our understanding of interdependence. Jackson, Ottaway, and Shying have done a remarkable job. Let’s make this more than “the blaring car alarms that barely registers.” The publisher may be Australian, but the book is worth the tariff.
Title: Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability
Editors: Andy Jackson, Esther Ottaway, Kerri Shying
Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann
Date: 2025
Read Michael Northen’s review of What’s Left is Tender in this issue of Wordgathering.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Book Reviews | Back to Volume 19, Issue 2 – Winter 2025-2026
About the Reviewer
Michael Northen was the facilitator of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop from 1997-2010 and the editor of Wordgathering from 2007-2019. He was also an editor of the anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press). Additionally, Michael co-edited Every Place on the Map is Disabled, an anthology of disability poetry published by Northwestern University Press in early 2026.