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Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability
This three-part book is a series of award-winning essays from the first Helen Keller Foundation International Memoir Writing Competition. They give voice to writers with ongoing disabilities, those who have overcome their disabilities, and from those dealing with another's disability. Their stories are real and inspirational, honest accounts on the nature of living with disabilities and the ways a life-altering disability affects and shapes their experiences. "Helen Keller taught the world to reconsider the remaining abilities of the disabled, and in doing so, she forever increased their life potential. Now these memoir authors, by their words and actions, are teaching the same lesson in her name." Robert Morris, M.D., President, Helen Keller Foundation for Research and Education.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2008
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September 27, 2014
since this is a compendium or anthology, it's not a straight read for me but the last contribution, the story of a woman who overcame polio as an adolescent, was written by a friend of mine and the first contribution, a poem, was amazing:
Reading Lips
by Amy Alznauer
Forgive my fingers pressed against your face
To hear by catching the force of air
Expressed, each little stretch, each grimace
And slack, as if by touch I mean to stare.
So intimate for one drawn back by sight,
Your world spread coolly out through distance seen
Not clasped, up close and muggy to you tight
Like mine, nor lost when space drops in between.
We move through different rooms. They say yours fills
Like glass, with some diffuse transparency,
Intangible except when color spills
Across the gap yet keeps your privacy.
And still in dark your distance holds.
You can't collapse the open reach and spread
To be wrapped up like me with cotton folds
The room drawn small around you in the bed.
But what if touch could see? Could bring
In one collective sweep this place to mind?
All things would rush against my skin and fling
No heat or texture just the airy blind.
Caress of wood, the fabric's droop, and fleet
Of dust. Each cornered, blunt, or jagged shape
And dreg of space would rain, a single sheet
Of tactile sense like vision's steady drape.
I'd feel you flush, your body's breadth and height,
Upon my length. I'd know at once this room.
And you inside the room. Your every sleight
Of hand and careless gesture I'd consume.
Instead, I sit before your gaze, submit
To some ubiquitous touch, and let you trace
My frame, envelop me. So please admit
The barest press of fingers to your face.
Reading Lips
by Amy Alznauer
Forgive my fingers pressed against your face
To hear by catching the force of air
Expressed, each little stretch, each grimace
And slack, as if by touch I mean to stare.
So intimate for one drawn back by sight,
Your world spread coolly out through distance seen
Not clasped, up close and muggy to you tight
Like mine, nor lost when space drops in between.
We move through different rooms. They say yours fills
Like glass, with some diffuse transparency,
Intangible except when color spills
Across the gap yet keeps your privacy.
And still in dark your distance holds.
You can't collapse the open reach and spread
To be wrapped up like me with cotton folds
The room drawn small around you in the bed.
But what if touch could see? Could bring
In one collective sweep this place to mind?
All things would rush against my skin and fling
No heat or texture just the airy blind.
Caress of wood, the fabric's droop, and fleet
Of dust. Each cornered, blunt, or jagged shape
And dreg of space would rain, a single sheet
Of tactile sense like vision's steady drape.
I'd feel you flush, your body's breadth and height,
Upon my length. I'd know at once this room.
And you inside the room. Your every sleight
Of hand and careless gesture I'd consume.
Instead, I sit before your gaze, submit
To some ubiquitous touch, and let you trace
My frame, envelop me. So please admit
The barest press of fingers to your face.
Displaying 1 of 1 review