Reviewed by Anne Kaier
When I began to write poetry at age fifty, jotting phrases down on my lunch break and at night, I thought long and hard about how to frame my physical difference, a skin disorder I’d had since birth but had never written about. There’s nothing overtly pretty or awe-inspiring about ichthyosis, a rare disturbance of the skin which features scale and an overly red face. Yet I thought of myself as a competent, intelligent, and spirited woman. How should I characterize my disability in my poems? Not with a cry for pity, obviously. But how? I decided to tell the truth, sometimes with metaphor and sometimes more directly.
How to handle, frame, approach disability in one’s poetry? That question, central surely to all such poets, is answered in many different ways in this magnificent volume of verse. It contains new and older work by poets from countries such as Australia, the U.S., France, China, Mexico, Kuwait, and Jamaica. The list includes names familiar in the West such as Linda Hogan, Ada Limon, Ilya Kaminsky, Jane Kenyon, Petra Kuppers, and Stephen Kuusisto. It also includes other poets from a wide range of styles and geographies. In her introduction, Rachael Boast, who happens to have ichthyosis, as I do, lays down the challenge. Versus Versus, she writes, intends to create “a space for nondisabled people to engage with a selection of outstanding poems, for deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people to enjoy companionship; and for some to play a part in opening up the conversation…and to show just how unenlightened our cultures are, and seek redress.”
The range of attitudes toward these questions and the range of poetic styles in this book are thrillingly wide. Some poets take a direct approach. “Flesh,” a powerful and memorable poem by the Irish poet Kerry Hardie, sets a scene in clean, sensuous language:
Sitting in a doorway,
in October sunlight,
eating
peppers, onions, tomatoes,
stale bread sodden with olive oil—and the air high and clean,
and the red taste of tomatoes,
and the sharp bite of onions,
and the pepper’s scarlet crunch—the body
coming awake again,
thinking,
maybe there’s more to life than sickness,
than the body’s craving for oblivion,
than the hunger of the spirit to be gone –and maybe the body belongs in the world,
maybe it knows a thing or two,
maybe it’s even possible
it may once more remember
sweetness,
absence of pain.
Clearly the narrator does relish sweetness like the crunch of the red peppers and just as clearly she acknowledges the deep desire to get out of all this, to escape pain into oblivion. In one sentence, this poem can encompass these conflicting and contemporaneous feelings that so many of us disabled poets have felt. There’s a push, in the culture at large, to always provide a happy ending to poems such as these, to let the able-bodied reader off the hook. If the poet can find peace and happiness, then maybe his or her disability is not so bad and the able-bodied reader can, in effect, dismiss it. Hardie, of course, does not accommodate these ableist yearnings. She faces pain upfront. The fact that we don’t know precisely what kind of pain isn’t relevant. Perhaps the fact that sweetness occurs only in memory by the end of the poem is merely bittersweet. Pain and pleasure. Together. That’s the experience for so many of us.
Ona Gritz’s haunting poem “No” is also told in straightforward language, confronting her disability squarely. She tells the story of a new mother with cerebral palsy who is trying to hold her newborn son so she can breastfeed him in the hospital. She rearranges the pillows but nothing works. Her right arm can’t accommodate the baby. Increasingly distressed, as any mother would be, she rings for the nurse, who coldly refuses to help her, saying the baby needs sleep, not milk.
Keeping you in my arms, I paced, I sang.
We cried in unison, both of us
so helpless, so desperately new.
The poet is telling a story, putting the effects of her disability front and center, but the last word, metaphorically embracing both mother and baby, gives the kind of punch that poetry is famous for.
Versus Versus contains multitudes of different styles and themes. Addressing the subject of the stares everyone with an obvious physical difference gets every single day when he or she walks, or rolls on the street, Erez Bitton, an Israeli poet of Moroccan descent, starts by turning an ableist trope on its head. Usually, disabled people do not exist for the ableist. Bitton’s speaker addresses them directly:
You
who cross my path
and do not greet me
know that to me you do not exist
and therefore
when you come my way
say hello to me
and each one of you
will be my friend
Some of the most powerful poems are overtly political such as Lateef McLeod’s “I Am Too Pretty for Some ‘Ugly Laws.’” Some speak to editor Rachel Boast’s challenge to “show just how unenlightened our cultures are.” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s “Crip fairy godmother” mixes a political thrust with an edge of the fantastic as the speaker addresses a newly disabled wheel-chair user.
Hi, baby crip
I know, you feel like a ton of bricks just hit you. They did.
But I’m your crip fairy godmother
and I’m here to tell you what’s going to happen. …
They’re gonna take your sick personally
I mean very personally I mean you are in a wheel-chair at them,
I mean you are puking and shitting for hours at them,
I mean you did this, by which I mean, you got disabled, to get at them
because they, the abled, are the centre of the world. …
Then Piepzna-Samarasinha executes a turn, a versus:
You will gain skill in learning to not predict the future
You will learn every magic trick
to shape-shift pain. …
Disability is adaptive, interconnected, tenacious, voracious, slutty, silent, raging,
life giving
Here the happy ending is really an affirmation of the strength and wiliness of the disabled. It doesn’t so much make things better for the able-bodied friend or reader as give the disabled a measure of their strength.
One of the most powerful political themes in this book of wonderful poems is how sexy some of them are. They assert the right and pleasure of disabled people to have a sexual life, one denied us in the ableist popular imagination and even in the minds of physicians following a medical model. Here is Kay Ulanday Barrett’s magnificent Sick 4 Sick:
Her body patched, swollen skin,
hair flecks gone rogue, mismatch
knees, ache knits quilt throughout.
Curvature, a soft thing.
They said
if we hum close
close enough that our chests touch,
shared breath comes from belly up,
-that, that is not platonic….
Come spring we never do this again.
There’s only memory of it,
how her lungs cathedral. How
I prayed there, on the ledge of inhale
sternum sacred, coughed hymn,
spasm luminescence.
Syllables stretched, muscled
sacrament more than splay.
us, petals in overlap
us, an ampersand
on fire.
In the poet’s telling, the very disability, the curvature of her lover’s body is in itself soft and sexy. Metaphorically, their lovemaking—in the flesh and in memory—is sacred; their bodies, as beautiful as petals, twisted like an ampersand, are holy.
I hope I’ve given you a taste of the wonderful poems in this important book. If you are disabled, as many readers of Wordgathering are, you’ll find “companionship” here—as Boast promises in her “Introduction.” If you are non-disabled, you can “engage with a selection of outstanding poems.” Whichever, if you decide to buy it or get it from your library, read and re-read it. You’ll be consoled, informed, thrilled.
There is an event featuring four poets from the book in conversation with editor Rachael Boast being held in the UK both in-person and online (YouTube) on Sunday, March 15, 2026, 16.00 to 17.00 pm GMT, 11 am to 12 noon EST. Registration is required.
Title: Versus Versus: 100 Poems By Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets
Editor: Rachael Boast
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Year: 2025
Read the Gatherer’s Blog (by Anne) and a review of Anne’s book, How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Anne Kaier’s new book of poems, How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?, winner of the Propel Poetry Prize, was published by Nine Mile Press in 2025. It’s available from Bookshop.org. Visit Anne’s website at: www.annekaier.com.