news | Thursday July 3, 2025

Disability Pride Month 2025

July is Disability Pride Month! To celebrate the month, we’re highlighting recent and forthcoming titles written by disabled/chronically ill authors who will knock your socks off.

This brand new poetry collection by the multi-talented Junie Désil explores the intricacies and intersections of chronic illness, the commodifications, and the burden of systemic injustice. Désil digs into the personal, medical, and career spheres, sharing the experience of seeking healing in a sharp world which does not always believe you or wish you well.

An excerpt:

“cancel all my health-type subscriptions,
turn off all my notifications and reminders
to drink water, to get up and stretch for thirty seconds,
to box breathe, cancel previously free now not-free pandemic
subscriptions during my short-lived shelter-in-place
aspirations of knitting, breadmaking, preserve making,
guitar playing, indie-film watching.

put on my noise-cancelling earphones
and actually – i want to so much –
rest.”

Check out allostatic load here.

Forthcoming this autumn is tours, variously by poet and researcher (with a focus on mad, disability, queer, and trans rhetoric) Drew McEwan! The poems of this collection saunter through an abstracted network of transformational encounters where bodies struggle with and against a game of follow the leader, postured by the series of connected rooms we share. Together they guide the reader through an interrogation of the ways we tour the spaces of language, always stepping between the sayable and the unsaid.

An excerpt:

“Advice:

Lay out the ground lines the length and breadth of the monument proposed.
Collect foliage for the upper tier, browned leaves for flooring.
What remains ever exterior to thought is thought.
Lay bare the concrete while still damp.
Place visionary on paper, anticipate business to come.
The room does not exist before revealing itself.
Curve and scale may lead us to false impressions.
Surveil the animal complacencies beyond the door.
A forum models a proportionate citizenry.
Retain the excess, motivate a corrective.
Count the legs of the chair before an occupation.
Do not allow negativity to presuppose a body only to remove it.”

Pre-order your copy of tours, variously here.

Our favourite poet from lunaria is back with another stellar poetic offering in th book uv lost passwords 1. ths book asks is langwage lost wev had creativ langwage almost 7 thousand yeers we still dont undr stand each othr veree well dew we want 2? the book uv lost passwords 1 arrives this fall.

An excerpt from “th alphabets uv our beings”:

“dayze n nites retreev us
conseev us re create us row guide n steer us enlarge us diminish us find sheltr n recuse releev spin resiliens clasp each othr in hopeful em brayce th pineal mysterious”

Pre-order your copy of the latest bill bissett here.

Wishing everybody an excellent Disability Pride Month!