news | Thursday July 13, 2023

Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month! Looking to read some titles by amazing, disabled writers? We’ve got some great recommendations for you!

The most recent poetry collection from the legendary bill bissett, its th sailors life / still in treetment seeks self-liberation. In true bill bissett fashion, this book refuses the rigid and prescriptive, favouring carving new paths of understanding. The poems in this collection are coupled with stunning illustrations by the author.

An excerpt from the poem “what 2 dew whn sumwun is:”

“trying 2 intrfeer infilitrate with in2 yr

mental life yr processes

dew not yell back

tell them they cant yell at yu yu

dont go 4 that yu dont take shit from
no wun aneemor”

Be sure to check out this latest work from bill bissett.

King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties by Marcus Youssef and Niall McNeil are two plays based on the stories of King Arthur and Peter Pan that meld the fictional, the meta-fictional, and the real in ways that are delightfully disarming. These are among the first plays written by an author with Down Syndrome.

An excerpt from King Arthur’s Night:

MERLIN

– we’re all going to be civilized. Us, we’ll be civilized here at

the Round Table.

ARTHUR

(to LANCELOT) Is there something you want to say to me?

LANCELOT

Yes Your Highness.

ARTHUR

What about?

LANCELOT

One question about the Holy Grail.

ARTHUR

Make it two.

LANCELOT

Two questions about the Holy Grail.

ARTHUR

Did God make you have an affair with my own wife?

Unpredictable and thought-provoking, these two plays are not to be missed.

Finally, we are so pleased to announce that a new poetry collection, No Town Called We, is forthcoming from Nikki Reimer. No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, societal panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. This book punches through the veils of complacency and greed that shape the cultures of the petrostate. These poems are meditations on an emergency, dispatches from wombat burrows and prairie hospitals. They consider the variegated forms grief can take, both marking and resisting their own decay.

Excerpt from poem “No Town Called Migraine Glaze:”

“We begin with a single-celled aura
select cravings to make us into entrepreneurs
rather than cats

Towards scotoma we come
knit one purl one looped over the cuckoo’s
nested-tuna glory
Hello, Baba Yaga? i miss we
is that you, salted anxiety?
still allergic to the antiviral fish slurry?
still working the word “superannuated” into a poem?”

We are so excited to introduce this stunning new poetry collection to the world this fall.

Happy Disability Pride Month! We hope you get in some good reading during these warm, lovely days.