Cripple Poetics
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A love story for crip culture! By turns playful, unsettling, raw and moving, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story is an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion-one keystroke at a time. Cripple Poetics is e-mails, IMs and letters between lovers; poetic rumination/invigoration; and disability arts manifesto. Reader Ann Fox (Davidson College) writes: “As lovers/poets/performance artists Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus court each other, they woo us as well. We are seduced by their great love of each other, crip culture, and a fierce, revolutionary dynamism that makes us want to whirl with them, through pleasure and pain, into the maelstrom of the possibilities for joy and expression the body-and this life-offer.”
The dance of courtship is reflected in language that alternately snakes and darts, declares and obfuscates, reminisces and forges-finding freedom within its limitations. “Cripple Poetics preserves and unfolds the artifacts of an original and timely love story that might otherwise have remained shrouded in a small, forgotten corner of cyberspace,” says publisher Jay Sennett.
“The dance and the eighth notes got loose: segued, went Rhumba, found poetry and got dolled up with Neil Marcus and Petra Kuppers. A crippled poetics is a perfect harmony with flesh and music and tongues.” Stephen Kuusisto, The University of Iowa
“This collection of poetry is a moving, lyrical account of two disabled lovers finding each other and blossoming in their mutual presence. With humor, feeling, and sexy vibes, Petra and Neil open up their intimate life to readers, and the result is a postmodern, crip version of Robert and Elizabeth Browing, or Abelard and Heloise. Stringing together the fragments of their love life, including poems, emails, e-chats, and other bits of communication, Petra and Neil recreate for us the warm flow of feeling that eddies deeper and deeper into a love for our time. No doubt these new lovers’ poetry will go down in disability history, joining the stories of famous lovers of the past like Romeo and Juliet, only this time the balcony has a ramp and the lovers meet by moonlight in power scooters.
Lennard Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Oh, yum. Oh, yay. We are so fortunate that these two met and wrote about their love and lust and the life of their minds and bodies and all spaces around and in between. This is luscious stuff, so erotic that my reptilian brain throbs as I read it. A great love story, told in the most poetic way, with all of what it means to be human fully engaged. I can’t wait for the movie.”
David Roche, performance artist, author of The Church of 80% Sincerity
“This collaborative collection highlights the strengths of both poets, and invites readers into their intimate exchange of ideas and feelings. As these two mavens of disability culture discover each other, we discover the world as they see it, rich with tender eroticism, simple daily pleasures, painful struggles, jokes and dance. This volume combines Marcus’ introspective, playful engagement with his body and environment, and Kuppers’ passionate exploration of the sounds and shapes of words. The result is a pleasure to read.”
Laura Hershey, disability culture writer and poet
“Cripple Poetics is many things: e-mails, IMs and letters between lovers; poetic rumination/invigoration; and disability arts manifesto. As lovers/poets/performance artists Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus court each other, they woo us as well. We are seduced by their great love of each other, crip culture, and a fierce, revolutionary dynamism that makes us want to whirl with them, through pleasure and pain, into the maelstrom of the possibilities for joy and expression the body--and this life--offer.”
Ann Fox, Davidson College
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