The Summer 2023 issue of Wordgathering includes 11 reviews that engage a broad variety of endeavors. Featured in this issue are reviews of poetry by John Lee Clark, Stephanie Heit, and DJ Savarese. Disability-themed anthologies, collections, issues of magazines and journals, and related writing and arts engagements continue to appear in the world. Works along these lines that are reviewed in this issue include: B. Allen and J. S. Allen (eds.), Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop, a NeuroQueer Books imprint from Autonomous Press; Khairani Barokka and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (eds.), The Massachusetts Review “Disability Justice” issue; and editor Kara Dorris’s remarkable and groundbreaking Writing the Self Elegy. Christopher Krentz’s Elusive Kinship addresses postcolonialism, Disability cultures, and intersectionality in bold ways. Meg Eden Kuyatt’s Good Different brings readers–especially youth–into conversation with ableism, with particular attention paid to embracing Autistic children as insiders. Emily Ladau’s Demystifying Disability might need to be required reading for would-be allies and accomplices in the Disability Justice struggle. Chris Martin’s co-constructed text, May Tomorrow Be Awake, has prompted both debate and some controversy; the book surely merits further discussion. Sophie Strand’s iconoclastic, interdisciplinary honoring of the mycological (The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine: Lunar Kings, Trans-Species Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists) is indescribably beautiful and complex while deeply readable and delightful.
- B. Allen and J. S. Allen (eds.), Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop
- Khairani Barokka and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (eds.), The Massachusetts Review: “Disability Justice”
- John Lee Clark, How to Communicate
- Kara Dorris (ed.), Writing the Self-Elegy: The Past is Not Disappearing Ink
- Stephanie Heit, The Color She Gave Gravity
- Christopher Krentz, Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature
- Meg Eden Kuyatt, Good Different
- Emily Ladau, Demystifying Disability: How to Be a Thoughtful, Informed Ally to Disabled People
- Chris Martin, May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and our Neurodiverse Future
- DJ Savarese, Swoon
- Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine: Lunar Kings, Trans-Species Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists
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