Reviewed by Kate Champlin
Content Warning: Explicit references to sex and sexuality
Anne Kaier’s latest book of poetry is grounded in vivid imagery and strong emotions that include lust, longing for connection, and the anger that leads to protest. The poems chronicle the author’s difficult relationship with her mother and her complex relationship with her own disability.
As both a child and an adult, Kaier has been asked to display her skin condition to medical specialists; two of her poems protest these encounters. Kaier has lamellar ichthyosis, a genetic abnormality that impedes the shedding of dead skin cells. The skin cells build up as scales. Skin may crack or peel and sometimes has a reddish hue. Throughout the book, Kaier compares her skin to tree bark, and especially to birch bark. This imagery links Kaier’s skin (visible and stigmatized) with pastoral beauty, nature, and the supernatural. Tree-people are often gods or goddesses in folklore.
Kaier’s natural imagery stands in direct contrast to medical models of her disability. In one early poem, Kaier recalls a time in her childhood when she stood in her underwear so that hospital personnel could photograph her abnormal skin. The situation was a prime example of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson termed the politics of staring. The photographs reduced Kaier to her embodied difference and turned a living and complex child into an object for medical intervention. Kaier pushes back against this dehumanization as an adult writer. For example, in the poem “Portrait,” the title is the name for objects of beauty that honor their subjects. Kaier also depicts herself spinning “slowly as if [the doctor] were fitting a dress,” another image that conveys acclaim and a valued personal appearance. The stark contrast between these images and what really happens in the scene conveys the full horror of Kaier’s childhood medical experience.
Kaier shares a similar experience from adulthood. Here, she is asked to meet with and display her skin to doctors as part of the Dermatological Society Skin Fair. Kaier hands her resume to each of these doctors in a desperate attempt to be seen through her accomplishments and her full humanity. Instead, doctors take her bio only to ignore it, pronounce her “the star of the show” solely because of the unusual extent of her difference, and pet the scalp beneath her wig (19). (There are other people with lamellar ichthyosis at the event, but only Kaier has the condition throughout her body.) Once again, Kaier pushes back through her writing, documenting an experience that makes her feel “flayed” and comparing the event to a carnival freak show (19). As she puts it: “At least I haven’t got a sign that says: ‘Alligator Girl’” (19). Kaier caps the experience with a dreamed visit from a tree woman who invites Kaier to touch her own skin and hairless scalp and to feel her wounds. Unlike the doctors’ touch, this touch is a tactile confirmation of physical similarity and a physical exploration of shared experiences; it is communion. The encounter acts as an imagined antidote to the dehumanizing experience Kaier has just endured.
All of Kaier’s poems are equally sensual, and many engage directly with the erotic aspects of Alice Wong’s edited volume, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire. These poems push back against the common assumption that disabled people cannot be sexual by demonstrating the erotic possibilities of the disabled body. Poems such as “Saturday Night” vividly capture Kaier’s eroticism. As Kaier declares:
In my narrow stairwell,
one stroke on my clit
opens
pastures, prairies, rills
between legs that peel
like birch. (24)
Later poems about lovers are equally erotic, and several particularly expand on Kaier’s engagement with disability intimacy. “Dock” recounts Kaier’s waterside meeting with her lover:
Back in the rented room, we made love, laughing,
Irish Catholic love—halting, witty, guilt obscured.
I had a man whom I had known and loved for years,
who Mother warned would never want me.
but now, I loosened to his touch
and, in the morning, lounged in silken shorts,
triumphant as a bride. (56)
The image is at once joyous and marred by the shadow of social stigma. As Kaier’s early poems demonstrate, the poet has felt excluded from the round of dating, marriage, and expanding families that her normative loved ones seem to occupy effortlessly. The image of the bride is especially ambiguous. “The Bride Triumphant” depicts the wedding of an apparently able-bodied woman—with Kaier shunted to the sidelines. Kaier directly mentions her “unwanted body/ so unfit for rituals such as these” (45). Moreover, as “Dock” tells us, Kaier’s own mother echoed this exclusion by telling her daughter that sex and romance were simply not in her future. Social stigma reinforced from within the family circle can be especially devastating. In light of these associations, it seems that after her sexual encounter, Kaier felt triumphant (over her mother in particular and ableist society in general).
The collection’s final section, “Death Songs,” is also filled with sensual imagery. Kaier’s mother “plunges her nose” into the bouquet of flowers her daughter brings her in the memory care unit (78). When Kaier provides end-of-life care for her friend and mentor, Alexandra Grikikhes, she strokes her mentor’s hair and touches her exposed spine. Along with other assistance, Kaier catches coughed blood in black towels so that her friend does not have to look at the stains. All of Kaier’s poems remind readers that life is wrapped in sensory impressions. These poems will remind readers that death too can be sensual.
Kaier’s deeply erotic and brilliantly imagistic poems will delight readers. These poems vividly chronicle medical objectification, complex relationships, loneliness, lust, and fulfillment. The poems are remarkable both unto themselves and as examples of disability intimacy. They are unforgettable.
Title: How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?
Author: Anne Kaier
Publisher: Nine Mile Books: The Propel Poetry Series
Date: 2025
Read the Gatherer’s Blog by Anne Kaier as well as Anne’s review of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.