Cripple Poetics

by Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, Lisa Steichmann

A love story for crip culture! By turns playful, unsettling, raw and moving, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story is an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion-one keystroke at a time. The dance of courtship is reflected in language that alternately snakes and darts, declares and obfuscates, reminisces and forges-finding freedom within its limitations. Cripple Poetics preserves and unfolds the artifacts of an original and timely love story that might otherwise have remained shrouded in a small, forgotten corner of cyberspace.

Genres: Disability, Poetry, Disability Studies, Nonfiction

124 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2008

Reviews

[Tyler Baphomet]

Beautiful, emotional, touching, engaging. All words i'd describe this poetry book with. It's a love story between two disabled people. It explores disability culture, activism, disability rights, history, disabled bodies. As a disabled person myself so much of it spoke directly to me and I couldn't help but cry. I took my sweet old time with it, not because it was bad, but because I wanted to sit with the words, digest them, and savor them. Even just typing this now, nearly a day after finishing it, I got tears in my eyes again.

Suffice it to say, i'd highly recommend this book. And here are some other reviews/background information/dialogue with the authors (found in another review on here).
http://eliclare.com/disability/crippl...
http://eliclare.com/disability/more-o...

[Queer]

Not the best poetry I've ever read. Not even the best crip/ple poetry I've ever read. But easily the best dialogue-centered poetry I've ever read. The form here trumps the content - though the content is quite good.

[Sarah Cavar]

This is a tough one to rate, mostly because the quality of work varied wildly from section to section and even page to page. At its best, this text was a hybrid poetic intervention/craft talk in crip ways of writing the world; some of my favorite portions were the meditations on writing and creating while disabled using the very poetic forms being discussed. Surrounding it, though, was a lot of, I guess, noise, a lot of unfinished work, and a lot of work whose significance to the collection I couldn't figure out.

I'm not a stickler on normative ideas of "polishedness" in writing, nor "completeness," but I couldn't help but feel that a lot of the material in here was extraneous to the purpose of the collection. Overall, when the writing was good, it was really good, and I particularly enjoyed Kuppers's amazing wordwork. Ultimately, I wish this was condensed into more of a chapbook or even long hybrid/lyric craft essay, rather than presented as a full-length collection.

[Emma Kolditz Jensen]

Read for my master thesis on desexualisation of the disabled body.