Disability poetry can be recognized by several characteristics: a challenge to stereotypes and an insistence on self-definition; foregrounding of the perspective of people with disabilities; an emphasis on embodiment, especially atypical embodiment; and alternative techniques and poetics.

But what would it mean to have a different starting point, a different foundation, a different center...or to have no center? What would it mean to live in a world that understood asymmetry as a prime characteristic? To live in a world sensitized by a crip aesthetic?

investigatory-somatic work performed by david buuck and ca conrad,

A technician can wheel me into the sick meat tube and my meat will register.

“Writers are needed,” Linton continues, “who can demonstrate that success in terms of disability is more than a personal triumph over physical adversity; it is a life that consciously reckons with the social forces that oppress and control.”

Eli Clare’s (1999: pp.123, 137) resonant phrases—“gender reaches into disability ...disability snarls into gender,”

In an essay titled “Feminist Disability Studies,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes the “major aim of all of my work in both literary and feminist studies is to show that the always overdetermined metaphoric uses of disability efface and distort the lived experience of people with disabilities, evacuating the political significance of our lives and

There are times, in the last minutes before I am allowed, or allow myself, more codeine, when the pain inside the joints simplifies me utterly. I feel myself descending some kind of evolutionary ladder until I become as crude and guileless as an amoeba. The pain is not personal. I am incidental to it. It is like faith, the believer eclipsed by

i asked not: what is this situation of accelerated becoming good for? but: in what ways has this so-called body always been a site of occultation, a deluded witness, where my understanding of agency has been predicated on layers of mediations much thinner than anything here should allow for?