Reviews

How do you write a memoir when the memories themselves are missing? This is the central question of Kerry Neville’s Momma May Be Mad, a fragmented and deeply intimate account of memory loss, motherhood, and mental illness. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Neville writes openly about her experiences with alcoholism, anorexia, self-harm, and the severe depression that eventually led to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Neville loses large portions of her past, leaving her with o

In Terminal Surreal, poet Martha Silano confronts her diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with a collection that is at once contemplative, defiant, and unwaveringly honest. Published just months after Silano’s death, the collection’s structure traces a loose arc, beginning with the author’s first signs of illness and continuing through its progression. Yet, rather than embracing a purely linear timeline, these poems weave together moments of uncertainty and rea

The experience of reading Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection Hardly Creatures is like moving through an art gallery—there are rooms, placards, accessibility guides, sensory rooms, and benches to pause and reflect upon the art. The white pages of this collection become the walls of the gallery and Colgate hangs his poems upon them, inviting the reader to experience the work from multiple angles by inhabiting a physical perspective, providing a stark reminder that en

Ellen Samuels’ new poetry collection, Your Body Should Be a Part of the World, explores themes of chronic illness and the natural world, drifting between and blending the two. The poems weave through hospital visits, procedures, reflections of scars (both physical and emotional), and moments in the garden. Another prominent theme in this work is survival, especially the complicated emotions that arise when considering the fact that “every year [the speaker] spend[s] more days

In his new book of poetry, What’s Left is Tender , Travis Chi Wing Lau documents the numerous faces of tenderness as it intersects with disability, queerness, and culture. Lau traces the experiences of complex love, despite enduring violence that is both malicious and perpetrated in the name of protection. Love permeates this collection as Lau reveals the ways we can become tender despite violence, and the ways we can honor those who have passed by telling their stories. Almo

In her latest book, The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today , Susanne Paola Antonetta traces over 200 years of history through Germany’s Sonnenstein Castle asylum, uncovering how one of the most enlightened psychiatric care programs in Europe eventually became a site for the Nazi’s eugenic Aktion T4 euthanasia program which murdered hundreds of thousands of disabled people against their will. From the early 1800s

With a voice that is at once lyrical, intimate, and unapologetically confrontational, Liv Mammone explores the intersections of disability, queerness, and identity in her new book Fire in the Waiting Room (Game Over Books, 2025). This collection of poems challenges readers to confront society’s tendency to push disabled bodies to the margins by demanding that readers recognize the fullness of disabled lives, including their capacity for pleasure. Mammone disrupts cultural no