Beauty is a Verb

By Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Northen
Paperback: $21.95

A ground-breaking anthology that will bring fresh understanding to the American experience of poetry, beauty, the body, and disability.

Description

Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both.

Crip Poetry.

Disability Poetry.

Poems with Disabilities.

This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace.

For the reader of good poetry interested in the diversity of American expression, this anthology provides an understanding of the history and contemporary vitality of the poetry and poetics of the non-normative body.

About the Creators

Sheila Black

Sheila Black is the author of over 40 books for children and young adults as well as the author of two poetry collections and two chapbooks. Black was chosen as one of the 2012 Witter Bynner fellowship recipients. She was born with X-Linked Hypophosphatemia (XLH), a rare genetic bone condition, often called Vitamin D Resistant Rickets. Two of her three children also have XLH.

Jennifer Bartlett
Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Her publications include Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2005), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2011), and Anti-Autobiography (Saint Elizabeth Street / Youth-in-Asia Press 2010). Bartlett is a cofounder of Zoeglossia, which is a literary organization that acts as a community for poets with disabilities.

Michael Northen

Michael Northen edits Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry and coordinates the annual Inglis House Poetry Contest for disability-related poetry. For over 40 years, he has taught adults with physical disabilities, women on public assistance, prisoners, and rural and inner city children.

Awards

  • Notable Books for Adults

    American Library Association (ALA)

Reviews

  • * "This powerful anthology attempts to--and succeeds at--intimately showing. . .disability through the lenses of poetry. . .What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other."

    - Publishers Weekly
  • "A groundbreaking collection, bringing together those, like Larry Eigner and Josephine Miles. . .and powerful new voices, like Amber DiPietra and Rusty Morrison. As the poets and poems speak to--and sometimes argue with--one another, we see a new strain of poetry growing before or eyes. The effect is far more than cumulative: it is astonishing."

    - Anne Finger, author of Elegy for a Disease
  • "This is a sensational, stunning book--one of the best literary collections in a very long time. We are speaking about powerful writing changing us--readers of Beauty Is a Verb will be mightily, irrevocably altered and enlarged--in ways we deeply need to be. Thank you authors and editors for a brilliant anthology."

    - Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel
  • "Revelatory, provocative, harrowing, and bold, the poems are also accompanied by personal essays that create thresholds into each poet's whys and wherefores. These voices range from the specific and personal to the abstract and philosophical, sweeping any reader--including the temporarily able--into the profoundest questions of how to live."

    - Molly Peacock, author of The Paper Garden
  • "Immerse yourself in muscular poems of tenderness and intensity, intimate poems of eloquence and bluntness, profound poems that present disability's difficulty, challenge, and pride--all the while exploring the triumph of the human condition"

    - Marie Kane, author of Survivors in the Garden
  • "[Beauty is a Verb] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century. . . the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same."

    - Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree

Paperback

  • ISBN 9781935955054
  • Publication Date Oct 11, 2011
  • Trim Size 9 × 6 in
  • Weight 0.4375 lbs
  • Page Count 384
  • Interests

  • Audience Adult
  • BISAC Category 1 POETRY / American / General
  • BISAC Category 2 LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
  • BISAC Category 3 SOCIAL SCIENCE / People with Disabilities
  • Themes Disabilities, Multiple Ethnicities Represented, Nonfiction, Poetry
  • Reading Levels

  • Guided Reading Z+
  • Interest Level Adult
  • Reading Level Adult
  • ADA Site Compliance-Accessibility Policy