Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Paperback or Softback)

A ground-breaking anthology that will bring fresh understanding to the American experience of poetry, beauty, the body, and disability.

Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both.

Crip Poetry.

Disability Poetry.

Poems with Disabilities.

This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace.

For the reader of good poetry interested in the diversity of American expression, this anthology provides an understanding of the history and contemporary vitality of the poetry and poetics of the non-normative body.

Sheila Black is the author of over 40 books for children and young adults as well as the author of two poetry collections and two chapbooks. Black was chosen as one of the 2012 Witter Bynner fellowship recipients. She was born with X-Linked Hypophosphatemia (XLH), a rare genetic bone condition, often called Vitamin D Resistant Rickets. Two of her three children also have XLH.

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Her publications include Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2005), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2011), and Anti-Autobiography (Saint Elizabeth Street / Youth-in-Asia Press 2010). Bartlett is a cofounder of Zoeglossia, which is a literary organization that acts as a community for poets with disabilities.

Michael Northen edits Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry and coordinates the annual Inglis House Poetry Contest for disability-related poetry. For over 40 years, he has taught adults with physical disabilities, women on public assistance, prisoners, and rural and inner city children.