Hardly Creatures
by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Books of lyric poems work like museums: We enter, we wander, we investigate, we marvel at our favorites, if we can find them, and we ask ourselves how they came to be. Colgate’s exciting, sometimes shocking HARDLY CREATURES (Tin House, paperback, $16.99) makes that comparison explicit, then gives it a disability focus. Section headers (“Medical Portraits”; “Exit and Gift Shop”), and symbols (a wheelchair; CC for closed captioning), and some poem titles (“We Do Not Enter the Gallery”), imagine the collection as a museum devoted to disability access, a space made of language in which “you are meant to be here.”
Inspired by (among others) the DeafBlind poet and essayist John Lee Clark, Colgate unfolds a welcome array of poems about his own queer, complicated, sociable life in New Haven and Toronto: his love for his friends and for his partner, Eli; his “shame in pursuing happiness”; his schizoaffective disorder; “body dysmorphia”; and what advocates call disability gain, the way other senses and possibilities sharpen when one of them gets undermined or removed.
Colgate’s poems attend, delightfully and exceptionally, to extraordinary bodies and to shared physical needs (“I go over to Lorraine’s on Thursday to lift her onto the toilet”). Better yet, they attend to the joys, the constraints and the weirdness of new and old poetic forms. Colgate can roll accounts of his life into ghazals, stack them in abecedarians, shuffle them into sestinas or drop into a cascade of intimate truths, much in the manner of C.D. Wright: “I am not brilliant. I do not know how flowers work. … When gender dies I must find a way/To remain fabulous. One thing about psychosis is that the physics/are fabulous.” So is this astonishing first book.
Doggerel
by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Tender figures of fatherhood, raising boys; idyllic walks and a “bike ride” through “Italian countryside”; the poet’s Jack Russell (called Taylor or Tay-Tay); and other “small/Dogs who appreciate the chance silence/Gives” unite to make Betts’s fourth book of poems, DOGGEREL(Norton, $26.99), a welcome respite from almost every other serious book of poems you could read this year.
Domestic calm and the chance to catch your breath carry more meaning here beside the earlier life Betts recalls in other poems: Incarcerated as a teenager, Betts (“Felon,” “Bastards of the Reagan Era”) found acclaim in his 20s with carefully observed verse about the ordeals and lessons of prison. Now a Yale-trained lawyer, memoirist and MacArthur “genius” fellow (as well as a visiting lecturer at Harvard, where I also teach), Betts can still look back on his time behind bars, when the word “kite” meant a letter from outside, an imaginative flight. He takes in, too, his sometimes chaotic childhood in Washington, D.C., comparing it to his own modern family: “the only burden too/Worrying is never seeing your father/Weep.” Few poets match Betts’s way with quotable rhetoric. Better yet, he gives good advice: “Suffering in art feels like somebody made/It to tomorrow, at least.”
