For the past four years through a grant from the Propel Foundation, Nine Mile Press has been publishing books by disabled poets who are writing some of the best poetry in this country.

 

It may seem surprising that the world of poetry should be as infected with ableism as it is. Poetry is by its nature an enemy of the normalizing. Its innate antagonism to the normative in favor of the individualizing truths of human experience should make it open its arms wide to the complex sensoria and angle of vision of disability life. And yet it doesn’t.

 

Ableism, that inability of the abled to imagine the experience of others, happens even in literary circles. As a blind writer I’ve been asked: “how can you write with clarity about the world when you can’t see?”  

 

“Outside the box” is a tired cliche but disabled poets show what it can really mean. Consider these lines by Tito Mukhopadhyay whose book Finding the Faces and Other Poems we published three years ago. For Tito seeing faces is next to impossible owing to his autism. Spotting a man with glasses on a bus he says: 

 

I was relieved never to know his face. Looking directly at a human face is not easy for me. Faces blur or begin to turn into something else every time I try to look. I preferred a pair of reading glasses reflecting through the window - how the outside reflected back through the reflection.

 

Later he writes:

 

The Greyhound bus was a random moving point anywhere on earth, my eyes anchored to the reflection of Otto Manfred’s reading glasses, my head searching a story. These journeys are never long.

 

Tito’s poetry is hazarded: its discoveries are impossible to have imagined before setting out. There’s no framing of the eye.

 

Many people see disability as a metaphor for decay. Abled poets also think of poetry itself as a vehicle for sadness and abjection. Robert Bly titled his graduate poetry thesis at the University of Iowa “Steps Toward Poverty and Death.”

 

But the disabled poets I know are remarkably undead. They’re not sad without fingers. They don’t need to stand, walk, see, hear, or speak.

 

In an essay for The Iowa Review, autistic poet D.J. Savarese writes:

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Scandent scandal, my eye unmakes the world; it offers, in Skinner’s phrase, a “disintegrating framework,” one in which possibility dazzles. Dazzles because it does not yet cohere. High above the ground, my eye smells the light, listens to the flute-playing clouds.

 

In his book Swoon, Savarese pulls readers through a hundred disintegrating frameworks—the edges do in fact disintegrate: 

 

Sharp Edges

 

The waves are like sandpaper

for the ear, burnishing sound:

sharp edges become round.

 

I used to play in that sound

before I had words, before the whir

had resolved into world.

 

Wading into its depth,

I would flap my arms like a bird,

make a similar sound—

 

my unfeathered father

feared I would drown.

Near the beach of my bed

 

lies an ocean by Brookstone,

Nights take me back

to such sound.

 

Savarese goes inside sound where nothing’s stable. A bed becomes a shoreline. Innocence, solidity, and machine noises mimic waves, and suggest the places from which language springs, places about which we still know next to nothing. Here’s the book’s title poem:

 

Swoon

 

The ear that hears the cardinal

hears in red;

 

the eye that spots the salmon

sees in wet.

 

My senses always fall in love:

they spin, swoon;

 

they lose themselves in one

another’s arms.

 

Your senses live alone

like bachelors,

 

like bitter, slanted rhymes whose

marriage is a sham.

 

They greet the world the way accountants

greet their books.

 

I tire of such mastery. And yet, my senses

often fail

 

to let me do the simplest things,

like walk outside.

 

Invariably, the sun invades

my ears

 

and terrifies my feet—the angular

assault of Heaven’s

 

heavy-metal chords.

I cannot hear

 

to see, cannot see to move.

And so, I cling,

 

as on a listing ship at night,

to the stair rail.

 

The synesthesia here isn’t easy. The sun invades the poet’s ears and terrifies his feet. Imagine André Breton’s sensorium minus the enjoyment. Breton: A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word “like." Maybe. But autism is not always as fun. Savarese clings to a railing for all he’s worth. In his book The Humanitarian Dictator, Abhijit Naskar writes: “We, on the spectrum, are often misconstrued as rude or audacious. Problem is not that we feel too little, but that we feel too crippling much.” In his poem Savarese calls this sensation ‘the angular assault of Heaven’s heavy metal chords.” 

 

“Telling” disability means resisting the falsified. If the disabled have been exiled by history, by the architectures of cities and policies of the state, disability poetry can change the terms of awareness.

 

The poems in Nathan Spoon’s The Importance of Being Feeble Minded have a toughness about them as if perhaps, the epistemology of disability is a street fight. As readers we like the fight. I’m reminded of Ernesto Cardinal’s utterance: “Life is Subversive.” Consider these lines: 

 

I like snakes

there should be more snakes

lying on sidewalks and living room floors there should be more snakes

in bathtubs there should be more snakes

on the internet snakes

should be coiled under more tongues and more tongues should be the tongues of snakes

if you don’t understand this that’s fine and I’ll have to wish a plague of snakes

upon you and yours most days I find snakes

are confusing

 

Yes, there should be more snakes, both imagined and real, but meanwhile, let’s admit they are outside of polite society. As figures in a poem, they are designedly discomforting. As the rhetorician Jay Dolmage notes, we understand "imperfect, extraordinary, non-normative bodies as the origin and epistemological homes of all meaning-making.”

 

Even in the fragmented twenty first century, readers want to find community on the page. What does it “require”? One thinks of Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life”: Pay attention./ Be astonished./ Tell about it. Anne Kaier’s How Can I Say it Was Not Enough is invitational though the invitation can be quite sober. Consider the poem “Collodion Baby”:

 

I shrank from my own skin for years,

withdrawing like a wave that leaves a yellow foam behind.

But my body waited for me all this time,

’til now at last I reach for kisses

like the naked baby in her crib.

 

If the body is viewed as a site for abjection then the poem should of necessity suggest something more interesting. This is body-mind: 

 

For weeks, I languished in the ward, where nurses, tending war wounded men,

neglected me. Then my mom came back,

tucked me in a wicker laundry basket, carried me 

down the great white steps of Allegheny General,

and nestled me where she could feed me when I cried.

“I tried hard,” she says. “I didn’t give up.” So, giving up had crossed her mind.  

Just let the baby die she might have thought. This strange, disordered daughter.

 

When all is said and done, do facts speak alone? Or do I need to say, 

“My mother took my life into her hands and brought me home?”

 

There’s gratitude here—an open-handedness.

 

Kaier writes:

 

After the Golden Afternoon

 

After the golden afternoon,

when the dark came down like a blade,

a sudden illumination spoke.

 

Last night, my widowed mother tossed her auburn hair

as if she were a girl of twenty.

“Oh, I turned heads,” she said. “The boys flocked around.” 

She looked at me and smiled. “But I waited

for your daddy.”

 

Staring at her candlelight, at last I understood 

how her creed had bound me:

beauty before marriage, but marriage isn’t everything.

 

What labor, this autumn, readied me

for this simple truth,

let it sit upon my mind

like evening sun on ploughed fields?

 

Kaier insists we stay open to the wisdom of forgiveness. Her poems are original because she says what forgiveness is for.  It's a forgiveness labor— one lives with disability but doesn’t have to overcome it.  

 

Lisa M. Dougherty’s The Dead Tree Garden is a collection “unlike” many a book because she insists there is life outside containment. 

 

In her poem “Killdeer” she writes:

 

Why the sight of thought 

Makes you stand perfectly

Still in the presence of her

Absence. You attach yourself to

Who takes you away from

The being that you are. Bird

Is it that you have forgotten 

The cracked shell your heart is

Nests in the brittle shrubbery

Of the past growing more

Present, that you cannot even

Drag your unbroken wing

As if it had been 

Brave to desire this

One transitory body.

 

It’s the “transitory body” we’re concerned with, the body we sense fleetingly and which we must must invariably compare to our own. In the hands of a striking poet, this comparison is urgent, tender, and sometimes dark. Consider “The Deep Falling Inside Her”:

 

Inside her there is a streetlamp

 

that some nights she can meet you under

not so far from the pain 

 

as she would have you think,

she pulls you into her

 

do not flicker through            the deep falling 

 

inside her is a light

you haven’t before reached.  

 

The space we feel in these poems would be hard to paint. This has always seemed to me to be one of the great virtues of poetry, that it can center for us things that can’t be seen. But feeling enters into these spaces. It often suggests the imagination has come from some great distance. There is a fierce independence to Dougherty’s work. Again, consider “Somewhere on the Ledge of Fallen Things":

 

Somewhere on the Ledge of Fallen Things 

 

Maybe it’s a dust covered windowsill. A mantle often overlooked. Or a shelf in the bedroom of your grown child where her most favorite toys have sat long since having been played with. Did you not expect to end up here? At some point, waiting to be picked back up? I suppose you need me to tell you— you can’t be all broken. Not all at once anyway. Look here, a glass bottle with a chipped lip. You don’t really know why you kept it, but for how the sun still finds a way to pass its light on through. Is that nothing like you? Even the old dried out remains of what used to be a blow flower, left for years between a closed window and an open screen. It still remembers the soft breath of your child lifting its seed. And how she laughed when they all blew back and stuck their fluff in her hair. Are you laughing now? Maybe there’s still something here that can help you. Somewhere on the ledge of fallen things, an old wooden earring box your mother had your brother give to you on your seventh birthday. Its hinges nearly pried off from overuse. Or not? But anyway, have you opened its lid lately? If you found its lost song, could you sing it for me?— or just once, try?

 

Lisa Dougherty’s work reminds me of Tomas Tranströmer: “maybe there’s something here than can help you.” Tranströmer also said: “you can see beauty if you look to the side.” We want to see the essences but they’re not in front of us.

 

Finally, I’ve always favored poets with musical educations. Dan Simpson is both a classically trained musician as well as a poet. Reading his work I’m reminded of Pope’s observation: Music resembles poetry, in each/ Are nameless graces which no methods teach,/ And which a master hand alone can reach.

 

Consider then opening of his poem “Some Holy Saturday”:

 

You will rise from your bed at four-thirty in the morning,

to find bitter weeping outside your window

and your yard filled with trees that were not there the night before,

large leaves everywhere soaking your hair with dew,

the thick smell of olives heavy in the air.

It is Peter, still crying

up through the crust of the earth,

and though no cocks have crowed yet,

and there is no farm for hours,

you are poised for the marking of betrayal.

 

It is Peter, still crying/ up through the crust of the earth—spondee and dactyl mixing it up and behind them the oboe of the traduced heart. This is music in the service of spirit and while most of us cannot reach it, a master hand just might, especially if the poet who’s blind and thinking of Christ’s betrayal is walking the verse into being: 

 

What will you do

if, following Leopard Road or Route 13,

you should be drawn by a congregation of curious crows

to Iscariot hanging from a tree,

the neck groove lapping over the rope,

his toga tented at the crotch?

And what if from the moon come strains

of Hollywood’s fourth cousin to Gregorian chant

with celluloid clicks and pops to let you know

this is old and serious?

 

This is a sober poem, a tone poem as Sibelius would have it, and for all its music the verse turns toward mentation and discovery:

 

And what if the man who made the cross

sleepwalks beside the road in the underbrush,

and your father now remembers

that yesterday, between twelve and three,

the sky grew dark over your neighborhood?

Will you kneel down in the road and pray?

Run to your home to take from your kitchen cinnamon and nutmeg,

the only spices appropriate for the Savior’s tomb?

Call the police?

Or walk to your church in silence,

hoping that the sun upon your back

is really the large hand of the fisherman reconciled?

 

I think here of Benjamin Britten who said of music: “It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.” 

 

Simpson’s poems propose that musicality should aim for making sense—of losses, of small or large discoveries, of the very business of inquiry. There is even comedy in this as the poet meditates on what takes the place of literature in the lives of those who don’t read it:

 

Let us pray for poetry

that begins in love

and then moves outward.

May it fill the mouths

of all who love.

 

“My dancing tumbleweed,”

the crane operator will say

to his wife on a Sunday walk.

And the bookstore clerk, leaving for work,

will embrace her beloved in the kitchen.

“Oh, my hot skillet,” she will say,

“my deep, deep fryer.”

 

Lawrence said he preferred his heart to be broken: “It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” Simpson asks us to conceive of our limitations as evocative and darkly comedic matters:

 

Schonberg

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Why would a young dog

give itself to guide the blind?

Ask the right question

to get a useful answer.

Did the dog have a choice?

 

What did the dog do,

once they neutered it

and slammed the kennel door

on its freedom dream?

It did its best to flourish.

 

And what about you—what

choices do you have left?

Do you take pleasure,

as Schonberg did in twelve tones,

unleashed by your limitations?

 

These poems display advantaged doubt. They are aesthetically subversive given the public’s longstanding view of blindness—that it’s a profound limitation that goes beyond sightlessness to suggest a blunted capacity for knowledge. When a blind poet invites readers to unleash their own limitations via the challenge of joy, one realizes how few analogies are to be found in the work of whatever we mean by “non-disabled” poets. 

 

In June of 2026 we’ll be publishing two new volumes: Returns: Poems Selected and New by Kenny Fries and If Only I’d Turn Into Someone Else by Sanni Purhonen, translated from Finnish by Stephen Kuusisto, Mika Suonperä, and Sanni Purhonen. Here are two poems from each upcoming collection. Stay tuned.

 

Sanni Purhonen: 

 

when I grow up, I'm going to be

a one-legged dancer inside a box

 

I go to Home Depot to pick up a saw

my fingers stiff as nails

a blood bolt in my mouth 

 

it’s fashionable to be a freak

that’s what everyone wants anyway

a poem about pain that isn’t real

 

as a child my hips were shot with nails

even that didn't really hurt

I had the best pills 

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Kenny Fries:

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Anesthesia

 

the night surrounds

skin and the moon   full

sends yellow light through

 

on cold nights

silence magnifies sound

and an elevator closing

 

to a child is an end

an amputation

you see   they have taken

 

my memory   the memory

of my own body   soundless   senseless

tearing of the skin

 

once belonging

to a three-month baby boy

 

there are scars in a cold night sky

touch them

touch them and imagine

 

a child buried

in silence   footsteps

make him reach

 

beneath white sheets   feet

once a child's

feet still kicking

 

I want to hold them

as if they were

my lover

 

but pain

like time happens even

while you sleep

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