During my time as a disabled student, I read few books about identities like mine. Those I did encounter were often written by abled writers or for abled audiences who valued certain stories about disability, those full of tragedy and pity, hope and inspiration, miraculous recovery or certain death. Work about the actual lived experiences of people like me seemed as invisible in the classroom and the canon as my disabilities were from the outside.

When I began to publish, I wanted to write the kinds of books I’d needed as a disabled student but found this difficult given the ableist education I’d received. I needed not only disabled literary role models but a (re)education on how to be a writer. My latest book, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, is the text I wish I’d had as a student, a craft book that interrogates power and privilege within the creative writing classroom, making space for disability to help writers best tell stories about their lived experiences. The various sections throughout the book provide readers ways to unlearn ableist craft advice they may have come across in traditional writing workshops, strategies for developing a disabled writing practice, techniques for designing disabled writing spaces, methods to discover disabled forms and structures for their creative work, practical tips for the business of being a writer, and various writing prompts. Nerve includes a bibliography featuring disabled writers and texts because visibility is essential in claiming our space in literature.

Here are seven poetry collections about lived experiences of being disabled.

Ultimatum Orangutan by Khairani Barokka

A careful examination of colonialism and environmental injustice, this collection explores the interconnections between humans, animals, and ecosystems, centering the stories of bodies of land and disabled physical bodies. These are poems about living in chronic pain, written from wheelchairs, amidst searches for medications, and during pandemics when vulnerable people are told to protect themselves despite living in an ableist world. They are poems about what it means to witness climate catastrophe and colonial violence, the body a resting place for rage, grief, and resistance. Here the speaker reveals the pains of histories and human systems, and the linearity of colonialism and apocalypse as compared to the fluidity of crip time and environmental design. Lyric and evocative, Barokka’s poems ask us to consider the bodies and environments we destroy and what it means to survive, as well as who has the power to decide, and at what cost.

The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn

A hybrid collection of prose poetry and lyric essays that defies expectation to claim and create meaning between categories, this book examines the ways a disabled life will not be contained by ableist boundaries. Utilizing the form of alphabetical encyclopedia entries, this collection shares the author’s experience with progressive vision loss and relearning to read and write braille as an adult, alongside philosophical meditations on the ways this lived experience connects to history, science, and medicine. Interspersed throughout the personal entries are reflections about etymology and writing systems, codes and cameras, tools and painting, and other rich connections to Cohn’s story and the way the world views disability. Cohn’s innovative form, which weaves linked micro-essays and prose poems to share personal grief and a remaking of the self alongside revelatory social insights, invites readers into a world where words must be remade in order to navigate the story of a life.

DEED by torrin a. greathouse

Formally innovative and lyrically charged, this collection’s examination of queer sex and desire centers the disabled body and gives language to the unspoken and unacknowledged. Deeply rooted in art, myth, etymology, and music, these poems are a mechanism of survival that allow the speaker to interrogate words and wounds, meaning and memory. This is a collection that honors and subverts poetic tradition, incorporating a wide range of familiar and invented forms that search for and speak of loving trans and disabled bodies, using this power to build community. These poems showcase a sharp rejection of medical, carceral, and legal systems and the words they weaponize to abuse and erase queer and disabled bodies. Full of blood and bloom, tongues and speaking, these poems reveal the significance of pain and medical erasure, and the stitches that bind us to the bodies we’ve been given. This collection is a reclamation of language and love, the stories we tell about seizure and scar, and what it means to survive in sickness, to desire and care for the disabled self and others.

Slingshot by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Intimate and intense, Slingshot draws readers into a world that is unforgiving and unapologetic, sharply reflected and critiqued by a speaker whose intensity and force call forth radical revolution. These poems about Black, queer, and disabled lives are detailed and devastating, timeless and timely, poetic innovation necessitated by a deep understanding of poetic tradition and the urgency of lived experience. Innovative on the page and the tongue, these poems demand attention and recitation, fastening themselves into weapons against a world that would erase these speakers and communities. Johnson writes with intensity and force about black queer trauma, sex work, disability, societal devastation and radical social activism, and collective grief and community care. Restless and defiant, these poems pulse long after readers have closed the page.

Exploding Head by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

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.

Everything that Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost by Sage Ravenwood

This debut by deaf Indigenous poet Sage Ravenwood explores the trauma of colonialism, familial violence, and the grief and anger of an animal self wounded and devoured by others, but also capable of great tenderness and survival. The poems throughout this collection reflect the wilds of the natural world and the inner world, the poet’s hands used to tend to the earth, shield the body from violence, or sign to others. Throughout the collection, Ravenwood centers Indigenous stories, including those about Native American boarding schools and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Just as she does not translate Cherokee words for readers, she also does not translate a disabled life for an abled audience, instead inviting readers to inhabit her lived experiences. This is a collection driven by rage and pain, violence and abuse, yet one that is also a tender reclamation of the self, one that asks us all to reexamine what it means to speak and listen.

Pills and Jacksonvilles by Jillian Weise

Bold and provocative, this collection of poems about sexuality, queer identity, and the body celebrates cyborg life, and occupies the sexy intersection of disability and desire, human flesh and technology. Examining the machines of our lives like televisions, DMs, texts, and video chats, Weise rejects the ableist world to invent new forms on the page modeled after the forms disabled people inhabit off the page. Weise challenges readers to redefine access in an ableist world, incorporating video sonnets, images, collages, screenshots, artwork, and other forms to remind readers that disabled writers must remake and rebuild disabled worlds and words for themselves. A profound examination of disabled community, this book pulses with human connection, crip and queer bodies and desires, opiate use and BDSM, dark bars and brightly lit online spaces, all the vulnerable and fierce intimacies of a chronic life.