Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
In December 2021, Orion Magazine published a special issue focusing on Disability and nature. “Bodies of Nature” joined and furthered the resplendent explosion in Disability-themed issues in literary, cultural, and arts journals and magazines as well as Disability-focused anthologies and Crip-empowering collections. This expansiveness has increased exponentially over the last several years, in particular. The anthology and “special issues” underscored in this review, published in 2022 in myriad nation-states and cultural locations, robustly contribute to the burgeoning global #CripLit and #CripArts movements.
The exemplary Orion issue begins with an editorial by Alice Wong and an accompanying illustration of Alice by Georgia Webber. (As noted in the Orion issue, Alice Wong’s story “first appeared in ‘Breath,’ an episode from Radiolab.”) The present review respectfully and enthusiastically seeks to invoke the Orion Disability and nature issue’s magic, pragmatism, and solvency–including its subtitle: “Survival lessons from disabled communities.”
A powerful plethora, the energy and approaches of Orion‘s “Bodies of Nature” reminds me in various ways of Petra Kuppers’ Eco Soma in both its tenor and aesthetics. As the lead editor of Wordgathering and having served as the Guest Editor of Nine Mile Magazine’s “special double issue” on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad and Crip poetics, I appreciate so greatly all of the past, recent, and forthcoming works in these Crip milieu.
In MPT’s “The Fingers of Our Soul: The Bodies Focus” issue, editors Barokka and Hale’s inclusion of “signed languages such as ASL, BSL, LSF, and BISINDO, Anthony Price’s translation using the medium of eye-gaze, and Salma Harland on the blind poet al-Maʿarrī” serve as paradigmatic, as well as in many respects being reminiscent of and in company with Imaginary Safehouse (edited by Shane Neilson, Roxanna Bennett, and Ally Fleming).
As Michael Northen notes in his review of Imaginary Safehouse, “The publication of Imaginary Safehouse [was] an important event in Canadian disability poetry. Unlike other predominantly English speaking countries such as the United States (Beauty is a Verb, 2011), Great Britain (Stairs and Whispers, 2017) and Australia (Shaping the Fractured Self, 2018), Canada to [that] point had yet to produce an anthology dedicated to its country’s disability-related poetry.”
Since that time, many new works, among them the “Crip Temporalities” issue of SAQ (edited by Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman), Sinister Wisdom’s “Glorious Defiance: Work by Disabled Lesbians” (edited by V. Wetlaufer), the Massachusetts Review’s “Disability Justice” issue (edited by Khairani Barokka and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson), and “special folios”—including “On Disability” (edited by Kennedy Horton and Olivia Ellisor) in the Spring 2024 issue of Pleiades, and “A Forum on Disability Poetics” in the Tupelo Quarterly (curated by Christopher Salerno)–find excellent company (and vice versa) with Poetry Wales’s Summer 2022 issue, In Between Spaces, and MPT’s “The Fingers of Our Soul.” Intersectional analyses; global and local contexts; commitments to an anti-racist, anti-ableist politics; and unapologetic reflections on oppression and social violence are present throughout these compendia.
When I think about the Disabled Voices Anthology (edited by sb. smith), Alice Wong’s and the Disability Visibility Project’s edited collections, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century and Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People: Crip Wisdom for the People, and the many works referenced above, it’s exciting and wonderful (and, dare I say, profound?) to reflect on what has been happening since these foundational works were brought into the world, and how much the “more recent” works owe to these collections, to their editors and contributors, and to so many other stellar examples.
Modern Poetry in Translation’s “focus” / special section, “The Fingers of Our Soul,” includes 24 works, each of which is (of course) translated, as the editors note,
from a range of signed languages, bringing with it visual interpretations of works performed in motion. We wanted to create within an ethos of equality between sensorial modes, and welcome the opportunities to explore and experiment with publishing varying presentations. We have distinctly privileged D/deaf and disabled poetics, being disabled ourselves, living in a time of genocides against the most vulnerable. Through these poems and translations we reach towards an understanding of d/Deaf and disabled experiences, reflecting an engagement with the form and limitation of the corpus–both as human body, and body of poetic work (2).
The Poetry Wales issue addressed herein includes over 40 poems along with features and reviews. There are individualized comments (editorial introductions) from each of the editors, written selections made by each editor, and a conversation with The Cyborg Jillian Weise that took place with both editors. Writing at the time of “organizing the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival” with their co-editor, an event which occurred thereafter in South Wales, Cardiff, “with simultaneous online streaming,” Bridgley reflects about COVID-19, “the ongoing pandemic.”
Bridgley asks, “What have we learned from the pandemic? Has it forced non-disabled people to recognize that we all live in the fragile space of a body?” (2). In a strong reflective parallel, Hodgson asserts, “This whole issue of poems explores all that we love, transforms fleeting headlines of death into the human–the systemic failings of the DWP which has led to deaths, the body made of glass, delicate and lethal. It has been sobering to wade through these poems, the emotional honesty, recognition, reflection of both the truths and the lethality of our world.” (3)
Stillhouse Press’s inaugural anthology exploring Disability poetics does not disappoint. With 33 Disabled writers’ works included (among them, poets, short story writers, and essayists), the collection invokes a cross-disabilities perspective in order to address–among other themes– power, reclamation, celebration, and nuances. Editor Rebecca Burke is forthright in their commentary about the “nonprofit, student-run teaching press,” and the importance of why and how it is students who “drive decisions about what we publish.” (1) As Burke notes, the anthology emerged in direct response to the press’s editorial board’s conversations (led by Burke) “about diversity and accessibility in publishing.” (1) Burke states candidly and affirmatively how and why such work must necessarily occur across all axes of difference.
Crip applause to all of these editors and contributors, and hooray for us–the fortunate, secularly blessed readership. Crip applause to the predecessors and progenitors. And, of course, Crip applause to and for what’s yet to come and to and for those who have yet to arrive or manifest.
Title: In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers
Editor: Rebecca Burke
Publisher: Stillhouse Press
Year: 2022
Title: Modern Poetry in Translation, No. 1, 2022: The Fingers of Our Soul: The Bodies Focus
Editors: Khairani Barokka and Jamie Hale
Publisher: Modern Poetry in Translation: The Best of World Poetry
Year: 2022
Title: Poetry Wales 58.1, Summer 2022
Editors: Zoë Brigley and Hannah Hodgson
Publisher: Poetry Wales Press: Cylchgrawn Cenedlaethol O Farddoniaeth Newydd
Year: 2022
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.