Bodily Compositions: The Disability Poetics of Karen Fiser and Laurie Clements Lambeth

Abstract

The article focuses on the poetry of Karen Fiser and Laurie Clements Lambeth to examine how poetic language and form are shaped by both the poets' bodies and the way that their bodies relate to their environments, to spaces and institutions both private and public. Poetic language allows these writers to articulate the layered, enigmatic relationship between the particularity of somatic feelings—the body's experience of itself and the spaces and objects with which it interacts—and emotional expression. Both poets develop an aesthetics that reflects the body's particularity and that explores the tension between the limits and possibilities of communication in speaking about emotion and illness. As aesthetic objects that bridge the gap between the sayable and the unsayable, these poems can be circulated, not only forging new communities of poets and critics, but also extending or changing the terms of the conversations that people are having about disability, the body, aesthetic theory, accessibility, and...