7 Poetry Collections About the Disability Experience

An Electric Literature Reading List including Exploding Head.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery writes about the lack of disability representation in writing workshops, her Sundress Publications craft book NERVE, and seven recent poetry collections about the disability experience by Khairani Barokka, Naomi Cohn, Torrin Greathouse, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Sage Ravenwood, and Jillian Weise.

Read the article here: https://electricliterature.com/7-poetry-collections-about-the-disability-experience/

Of Exploding Head, she writes: “A memoir-in-prose-poems, this collection examines the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder in girlhood, moving with the speaker through adolescence and into adulthood to reveal a mind consumed by obsessive fears and compulsions. Though the fear comes from within, it is also fostered by the dangers of the outside world, the speaker haunted by angels and gun violence, accidents and God, and the tangled concepts of living and dying that impact her relationship to self, community, religion, and her role as mother. Hoffman’s use of second person throughout this hybrid collection creates a necessary distance between writer and speaker, writer and subject, repetition a means of connection but also reminiscent of her lived experience, just as her genre blurring exemplifies the blurred realities of many disabled people. Rich with unique and unsettling images, the poems throughout this collection are both magic and monstrous, moving between the innocence of a child new to her diagnosis and the wisdom of an adult who has lived a lifetime with a chronic brain.”