#PopsugarReadingChallenge Book 13: Stairs and Whispers

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book by a deaf or hard-of-hearing author
Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, edited by Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka, and Daniel Sluman

The editors put a lot of thought into accessibility for this volume. Most of the poems have a link to a video of the poem being spoken and/or signed. There are detailed descriptions of the photos and other images. And there are appendices for trauma-related content warnings. There's also a glossary of relevant terms, including the way "deaf" is used to refer to the physical trait, and "Deaf" to the distinctive culture.

Even the title has layers of meaning: stairs and whispers are obstacles in the lives of mobility-impaired and hard-of-hearing people - and "stares and whispers" are a whole other issue when dealing with the non-disabled world.

The poems, primarily from UK poets, address a wide variety of experiences of being disabled in a world that is rarely accommodating. "Dear Hearing World" by Raymond Antrobus uses run-on sentences that reflect the grammar of signing, to say that "Deaf voices / go missing like sound in space and I have left Earth to find them." Markie Burnhope's "On the Final Days Before Your Transformation" uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for illness. (Sarah Awa's novel Hunter's Moon does something similar.)

Cathy Bryant's "Ms Bryant is Dangerously Delusional" is a found poem made from hostile statements by representatives of the "system:"

She used falsehoods in an attempt to justify all the fabrications
     and exaggerations with which she embellishes her accusations.
           After all, she does claim to be 'creative writer'.

There are poems about triumphs as well. Bryant's poem "To My Non-Disabled Lover" celebrates the partner who stands up for her:

-and I'm left, no burden, instead queen
to your passionate king, fierce as hell.

One of Nuala Watt's poems is about encountering her own poems in braille. Another, "On Her Partial Blindness," is a sonnet responding to John Milton's "On His Blindness:"

                                         .....So my poems need
to make a sense I'm neither banned nor blessed
but breathing here. I want to have my state
revealed so thousands at my bidding read
as I eat, sleep, kiss, swear, get children dressed.
​I feel and write. I do not stand and wait.

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