Hardly Creatures

The joyfully inventive debut by Colgate honors the disabled community. Complete with an access guide and legend denoting options for the reader to interact with the poems on their own terms, Colgate radically reenvisions how a text might support its reader. A poem about the speaker’s partner finding creative ways to convince the speaker to take his antipsychotic medication begins with the universal access symbol for “Access Support Worker”—a figure assisting another figure in a wheelchair—and includes the lines, “he slips the pills into the shredded mango salad,/ pinches a handful into my mouth.” Many entries draw connections between the disabled community and queer conceptions of the body centered on care and friendship, such as “Ode to Pissing,” which reformulates the speaker assisting a disabled friend into a casual acknowledgment of their shared humanity: “The song of piss on porcelain. Lorraine and I talk dreams of bathhouse raves,/ disabled teachers, careers in porn. I ask how she became so comfortable/ with friends wiping her and she shrugs, lifts her shoulders, checks if she’s done.” Colgate’s generous and perceptive poems make an impact. (May)