Disability in Contemporary American Poetry

Looking at experimental disability poetry, this book shows how poets from the 1960s to the present develop disability-informed poetics and use the space of literature to launch alternative theories of psychiatric and physical disabilities.

Revising two key binaries that continue to shape accounts of disability writing – experimentation versus identity, and difficulty versus accessibility – this book develops the concept “radical accessibility” to show how the perception of an oppositional relationship between experimental poetics and expressions of disability is a product of ableist concepts of self-reliance and aesthetic production. Using an approach that centers on writers with disabilities, Gould argues that formal experimentation makes poetry more accessible to writers living with disabilities and illnesses by providing the space to create alternative poetic forms for thinking the world and self.

Integrating the insights of poetics, health humanities, and disability studies, the book reveals how Amber DiPietra, Larry Eigner, Bhanu Kapil, Denise Leto, Claudia Rankine, Eleni Stecopoulos, Brian Teare, Hannah Weiner, and David Wolach's experimental poetic forms complicate the medical model of disability and mediate their embodied experiences, material conditions, encounters with Western medicine, and artistic communities.