By Alya Somar (@alya.somar)
For April, the FOLD is spotlighting a number of poetry collections from disabled authors. With the Paralympics wrapped up in March, the disabled community is at the forefront of Canadians’ minds. As of 2022, Statistics Canada reported that “27% of Canadians aged 15 years and older, or 8.0 million people, had one or more disabilities that limited them in their daily activities.” Disabled folks are an integral part of Canada, including the country’s literary world.
Poetry as a genre is unique in its ability to take on practically any shape a writer can think of. It forces writers and readers to see the topic of the poetry in a new light, therefore pushing the boundaries placed on marginalized authors. Poetry can be short and punchy, long and lyrical and everything in between. The form is truly limitless. With our recommendations this month, we hope you understand that the lives of disabled authors are just as rich and meaningful as the poetry they create.
April at the FOLD is a chance for disabled readers and writers to be celebrated, and we hope you share in that joy with us.
1) A Fate Worse Than Death by Nisha Patel (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Poems that interrogate the complexities of disability, based on the author’s evaluation of her own medical records
A Fate Worse Than Death is a stunning poetic investigation of the worthiness of disabled life as told through the author’s evaluation of her own medical records over the course of a decade. Living with treatment-resistant diabetes, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and complex chronic pain, Nisha Patel reveals how her multiple disabilities intertwine with her day-to-day life, even when care and treatments are not available. As she works through bouts of illness, neglect, and care, Patel reveals how poetry provides her a way to resist the sway of medical hegemony and instead offer complex accounts of pain, sickness, and anger, but also love.
Navigating the menial and capitalist systems of health care and paperwork, documentation, and forms, Patel uses clinical texts in visual poems that show how words like patient and client underscore medical access and denial of coverage more than words like person and care. Patel asks us to consider if her life is worth living – and saving. The future of her disabled body and her desire for it is a building meditation as the collection progresses, ending not so much with a finite ending of cured illness and disease than with a look at how we can embody hope and joy in a disabled body, as it is the body that, like time, goes on.
2) The Way Disabled People Love Each Other by Leah Lakhsmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press)
The latest poetry collection by the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled.
Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents’ end of life.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale – not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.
This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.
3) Notes From the Ward by Steffi Tad-y (Gordon Hill Press)
Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y’s new collection of poetry exploring bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet’s eye. It is breathtakingly truthful and disarmingly direct, a powerful intervention into a diagnosis that remains more medicalized and sensationalized than understood.
4) The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson (Brick Books)
Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing together a voice back together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.
The FOLD Admin