This new anthology of poems by deaf, disabled and neurodivergent poets feels weighty, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. The poems explore a vast range of different ways in which our minds and bodies can exist or present differently, but there is a thread of oblique disruption that seems to run throughout. What intrigued me initially about this new anthology was not the poetry itself, but the front cover (which isn’t easy to look at, being an optical illusion), described on the inside page:

This book’s cover features a square-shaped artwork by Polish artist, Julian Stanczak, entitled ‘Concurrent Colours’. The painting creates an optical illusion of vertical moving curved lines in red and blue, giving the impression of moving waves or sand dunes. At the edges of the painting the lines thin out so that they resemble a comb effect…

That cover image, with its optical illusion, which I initially dismissed as boring, and which appears to be continually moving, encapsulates, for me, the sense of open-ended possibility that poetry can create. And, in this case, it is particularly apt. The book’s introduction makes clear that this anthology is an attempt to move away from a ‘prevalent outlook’ where disability is ‘framed within a narrative of tragedy’, to one in which individual poets are given the space to construct their own narrative. The anthology invites us to examine a variety of situations and perspectives that we may have overlooked, and to perceive them afresh.

It seems strange, therefore, that there is no context or structure to frame the poems, so it’s not always clear which preconceptions we are being invited to re-examine. Given the ambitious scope of this book, an underlying structure (with poems arranged according to subject or theme) would have made the reading experience feel a little less fragmented. But perhaps this fragmentation is intentional? The editor describes the title ‘Versus Versus’ as ‘relishing in paradox but ultimately going beyond, transcending the pitching of one thing against another in favour of a bringing together’.

This fragmented-together feel is evoked in ‘Night Seasons’ by Stephen Kuusisto, where the poet is ‘reading alone’ late at night, feeding random pages from random books into ‘An electronic reader / For the blind’. Together, with Kuusisto (and the other poets whose poems are presented on these pages) we experience a disrupted sense of time, movement and space:

The body, stalled,
Picks fragments,
Frottage,
Scraps of paper,
Whatever comes.

This poem mesmerised me, with its presentation of fragmented, non-linear reading:

An old professor,
Bitter at the graceful way
The poets have
Of gathering terms
Inexactly,
Told me, ‘The poets are fools.
They read
Only in fragments.’

And I felt this was an apt image for the whole anthology. It is packed full of fragments, many of them graceful, and intentionally left open, from the oblique and imagistic to the playful and ironic. I was particularly struck by the enigmatic tone of ‘Crip fairy godmother’ by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, which begins with this greeting:

Hi, baby crip
I know, you feel like a ton of bricks just hit you. They did.
But I’m your crip fairy godmother

The poem goes on to describe the world from a disabled perspective, focusing on the reality of what feels like a parallel universe where ‘Your able-bodied friends will stop calling’, while also evoking the surreal and magical elements of this alternative existence:

Even death is different here
not a failure
but a glittery cosmos.

These lines express a spirit of defiance and reclamation of space that is echoed in many of the other poems. The villanelle ‘Misfit’ by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay focuses on a form of alternative movement:

My hands, as usual, were flapping.
The birds knew I was Autistic;
They found no wrong with anything.

The repetitive form of the villanelle affirms a sense of being in tune with the natural rhythms of the world, teasing apart the notion that there is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of moving through the world:

Somewhere a wish was rising,
Perhaps from between my laughing lips.
Why stop turning and turning
When right can be found with everything?

And other poems hold on to this same thread of moving differently, in a body that is perceived and judged by others. Therese Estacion’s poem ‘The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)’ evokes the unnerving sensation of constantly being watched: ‘It walks behind me in the park and proceeds to walk slowly to get a good look’. Such poems create an unsettling degree of self-awareness, as we consider the way in which we move through the world, the way that we observe and make judgements about others, and the knowledge that we ourselves may be observed in return.

Other poems that I particularly enjoyed reading were ‘In another life, I am twenty-two, gifted and curious’ by Chisom Okafor, ‘The Endlessness’ by Ada Limón, ‘A Field Guide to Stares’ by Karl Knights, and ‘An Evanescent Garden’ by Jane Burn’.

It feels like there is momentum within the world of disability poetics right now. I have recently finished reading the first issue of The Aftershock Review (a magazine that has emerged out of pain and trauma) and I am grateful to have one of my own poems included in Beyond / Tu Hwnt: Anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled Writers which was published earlier this year.

I’d also like to recommend Bethany Handley’s debut pamphlet Cling Film. Handley’s poems playfully explore the contrast between people’s negative perceptions of disability, and the freedom of living in glorious defiance of those same expectations. Cling Film is published by Seren Books.

Versus Versus is published by Bloodaxe Books.

Declaration: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.