
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
"The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing, " Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite "ODSP 1, 2, & 3, " which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.
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Information
Table of contents
- Dedication
- Chapter of Accidents
- The Best Thing about Today Is It Is a Feeling and It Won’t Last
- Good Sick / Bad Sick
- I Am Becoming a House
- I Wanted
- Magpies
- Side Effects
- Songs for Rejecting Boys at Parties
- Psychosis of Sea Monsters
- Disgrace Is Catching
- A Day for Worries
- Pathography
- Alignment
- Sweet Sixteen
- Narrative Competence
- An Atlas of Pelvic Inspections
- My Mother Stops Breathing Beside Me in the Night
- Proud Flesh
- Letter I
- Why I’m Afraid to Go Home
- Ghazals for an Absent Mother
- In Praise of Nieces
- How to Write a Character Witness Letter for a Parole Board (or Letter)
- Wellness Check
- Happy Onions
- Letter II
- Prodromal
- Drift
- Side Effects II
- Absence
- Dwelling
- Who Is Delighted by You?
- Reporting
- Letter III
- Stop Asking Why I Stayed, 2009–2017
- The Other Tenant
- Altered Sensory Phenomena Experienced in Bipolar Disorder
- Something to Believe In
- Practice
- Once
- August
- 2020
- Introducing Man
- Notes and Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Copyright