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My Body, My House: Disability Poetics

A Poetry Mixtape Edited by Ashley-Elizabet...

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The Poems

In Exile I Draw the Tower Card

Kyla Jamieson

Spruce, inadequate, and alien

I stood at the side of the road

It was the only life I had.

...

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Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google/An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google

The Trick

Roxanna Bennett

Let me be a ''poet of cripples" not

a patient etherized upon a table,

not a brain floating within a body.

In a moment I must be a body

in the place...

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Happy Birthday Moon

Raymond Antrobus

Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.

Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.

He makes the Moon say something new every night

to...

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When I Become You

Teva Harrison

I'd like to close the distance between us:

where you end, where I begin,

but your skin stops me,

I can't find my way in.

If I could, I'd...

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How to Triumph Like a Girl

Ada Limón

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse...

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The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

Therese Estacion

Itwatches alwayswatches

It walks behind me in the park and proceeds

to...

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aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?

Jody Chan

bedtime ritual summon a stranger tonight you

linger on my laptop screen

in the apartment hallway a door slams like a...

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The Fatigue

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

The Fatigue is just fatigue. It

sprays my body like

a numbing agent. Say the

way I sleep might not be

working, say the way I eat

might not be working...

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from Quit Dying to Die

Lauren Turner

When the doctors burrowed into my body, they unearthed a slew of tumours. Growths speckled across lungs and kidneys. (Later, they would find the duo nestled into my cortex.) A Starry...

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The Playlist

Recommended Reading

Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Deluge by Leila Chatti
Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz
The Danger Model by Madelaine Caritas Longman
A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving by Katie Farris
Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century by Alice Wong
The Undying by Anne Boyer
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison
Frog Hollow Press Dis/Ability Series of Chapbooks
Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

Ashley-Elizabeth‘s Liner Notes

I learned early on that my body was not like other bodies. I missed a lot of school, and I was always at the doctor’s office. Being sick put me on the lifelong path of managing and working with my physical and mental limitations. Until my twenties, I didn’t have the language to write about my experiences. Maybe it was because I didn’t know I could claim ‘disabled’ as an identity? Or maybe, I didn’t know that the poems I was writing were poems about disability? When I did claim that identity and visibility, I began to seek out other stories like, and not like, my own.

Disability poetics foregrounds the experiences of people with disabilities. Through poetry, disabled people define, shape,and maintain their relationships with disability. I have actively followed the poets in this ‘Disability Poetics’ mixtape and gathered their poems like talismans; keeping a disabled body moving in an ableist world can feel impossible, but these poets, and their works, have been guideposts.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch captures the full-body exhaustion that accompanies so many illnesses and disabilities, in their poem The Fatigue. When do we challenge ourselves to do more, and when do we acknowledge that rest and recuperation are essential for our health? Who can claim the time needed to care for their disabled body? Jody Chan answers a stranger on the internet; can ill people love too? Can they be loved well in turn? What do we sacrifice and edit to accommodate that love? A response full of love, a “drink/when you feel empty.” What do we do when we cannot communicate our embodied experiences? Dominique Parisien layers the complications involved with communicating what you know in your body to medical professionals and trying to do so when English isn’t your first language. Can technology help or hinder this understanding?

How do you cope when your body evades any clear treatment and when your mind and body must relearn everything you used to do so easily? Kyla Jamieson is honest about the cost of meeting and honouring one’s own limitations. Facing limitations can feel destabilizing but in the long run it can make you stronger: “When everyone went/ back to school I stayed/ home, stopped having/ goals, stopped dreaming/ of putting my body/ in a body of water.” It can feel like a betrayal to have a healthy body change to a disabled body. Lauren Turner powerfully claims, “A sick body is an enchanted forest, overflowing its borders with civil war.” But what about when our disabilities fall under the gaze of others, their judgement and scrutiny? Therese Estacion introduces us to the ABG or the Able-Bodied Gaze.

My intention is to showcase disabled writers and their writing as they wish to be seen. No definitions, no qualifiers, just stories, potentially joyous, potentially uncomfortable, representing all the diversity that exists in the disabled community. I claim no one answer, only space for our stories, for our lived experiences to be given the consideration we have historically been refused.

About Ashley-Elizabeth

Ashley-Elizabeth Best is a disabled poet and essayist from Kingston, Ontario. Her work can be found in New Welsh Review, CV2, Ambit Magazine, The Literary Review of Canada, and Glasgow Review of Books, among others. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and her debut collection of poetry, Slow States of Collapse, was published with ECW Press. Best’s chapbook Alignment will be published with Rahila’s... More

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My Body, My House: Disability Poetics

A Poetry Mixtape Edited by Ashley-Elizabet...

The Poems

In Exile I Draw the Tower Card

Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google/An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google

The Trick

Happy Birthday Moon

When I Become You

How to Triumph Like a Girl

The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?

The Fatigue

from Quit Dying to Die

The Playlist

Recommended Reading

Ashley-Elizabeth‘s Liner Notes

About Ashley-Elizabeth