Wordgathering

A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature
 

Volume 13     Issue 3     September 2019

Poetry in this Issue

Wordgathering began in 2007 primarily as a jornal of disability poetry. In this special issue, we are once again letting poetry come to the forefront. While we have kept our traditional poetry section, welcoming work submitted by poets, old and new, we have also solicited work from poets who have been an important part of the journal's history. The work of these writers can be seen in the second list below.

Each of the poems above is accompanied by an audio version. Most of the poems are read by the poets themselves, but a few have been recorded for Wordgathering by readers Melissa Cotter and Sean Mahoney who have provided so many of the audio versions of the poems over the years.

In the fifty issues since its beginning, Wordgathering has been fortunate to have a continued relationship and support of poets who by anyone's reckoning are among the most talented in disability literature. These have been friends, colleagues, contributors and, at times, editors. Wordgathering invited these writers to send three poems of their choice to this special issue of the journal. Some are old, most are new, but as a body, they are quite impressive.

  • Sheila Black, A Normal Body; The Day Moths; Mirror Phase
  • John Lee Clark, The Offspring; The Valediction; The Launch
  • Barbara Crooker, Playing with Matchbox Cars; Grating Parmesian; The Lowest Common Denominator
  • Ona Gritz, This Dance; Across the Hudson; Too Soon
  • Marie Kane, Marking the Sky; "Be Tough" He Says; Thanksgiving, 2018
  • Desmond Kenny , Dark Glasses; Saturday's River of Thought; Piazza di Spagna
  • Jill Khoury, depakote; Elementary School Interview; fold
  • Stephen Kuusisto, Ode to the Future Perfect; After so much is said and the candles are low…; A Brief Essay on Romanticism
  • Raymond Luczak, And Into the Many Shrouds of Night; Moonchild; November Roots
  • Emily K. Michael, Lingua Franca; Cello; Inside Jokes
  • Daniel Simpson, Measuring Distance; Moving Out; To a Polished Stone
  • Jillian Weise, The Phantom Limbs of Poets; Conveyor to Jael; Regulatory Capture
  • Liz Whiteacre, The Butterfly Effect; The Law of Inertia; The Stoic's Universe
  • Kathi Wolfe, Tambourine; One Day If I'm Lucky; What I Saw

Three of the poets whose work we solicited, Anne Kaier, Kobus Moolman and Jennifer Bartlett, chose to send prose pieces. Kaier's essay "Hand Trick" and Moolman's short fiction piece "Through a Window Darkly" can both be found in the Essay and Fiction section of this issue. Excerpts from Bartlett's Jennifer's Little Book of Traumas can be found in the Reading Loop of this issue.

If all of the above is not enough, this issue's Reading Loop by Sheila Black features more poetry, sampling the work of the writers who attended the first Zoeglossia Conference. These writers include Jennifer Bartlett, Stephanie Heit, Stephen Lightbown, Raymond Luczak, Naomi Oritz, Margaret Ricketts, Ellen McGrath Smith, Jessica Suzanne Stokes, Zoe Stoller, Elizabeth Theriot, Gaia Thomas, Viktoria Valenzuela and Connie Voisine.

During Wordgathering's transition to its new Syracuse site and editorship in December, poets may continue to submit poetry through our submissions@wordgathering.com email, continuing to follow the guidlines laid out in our guidelines section. The editors will be respond to submissions as in the past and update writers submitting work when any changes come along.

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