news | Tuesday July 2, 2024

It's Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month! If you’re looking to read some killer poetry by disabled authors, look no further! Here are three great collections to mark the occasion:

If you’re looking for a great book to celebrate with, why not check out this Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award–winner peter among th towring boxes / text bites by recent appointee to the Order of Canada bill bissett?

A work of visual poetry from the text:

Pick up your copy of peter among th towring boxes / text bites here.

the berry takes the shape of the bloom by andrea bennett is a gorgeous collection of prose poems. Some poems bear witnes, others hold grudges or shake free of them. Together, they entwine around enmeshed experiences of gender, family, trans pregnancy, fear, and becoming.

An excerpt:

“I’d like to have a body like a gun. Long and narrow,
smooth and cold and steel, able to hold gunpowder.
Instead I am soft like a cushion. I would like to be
as taut as a wall. My pulp as protected as a tooth’s.
And yet my body insists. My body offers comfort,
warmth, absorbs whatever an id has to spill.”

Get a copy of the berry takes the shape of the bloom here.

Recently longlisted for both the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2024 Raymond Souster AwardNo Town Called We by Nikki Reimer writes through the death of elders, societal panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. With Reimer’s trademark wit, this collection invites you to join in its joys and frustrations.

Excerpt from poem “Is it PTSD or Is It Cake?”:

“Hello, Apocalypse?

It’s we, Algernon

We muse on the professional liability that is grief

Yes we interrogate the position within the structure and

Yes we reinforce the structure and

Yes may we wrest this beam?

Mote meet eye

No Lazarus awakening

No vagus nerve vibrato

Yes scaley spiderweb nerves

Yes Pricklebody responds

This obituary is the best line

No this obituary is the best line

No words for past departures”

Order a copy of No Town Called We here.

We wish you great and impactful reading this summer. Happy Disability Pride Month!