RaveBarrelhouseIn spectacular bursts of movement and color, Emerson lives the gamut of autistic feeling. These poems, which blur the boundary between flesh and text, body and poem, affirm the collection’s opening demand: \'Please get that great animals are all / autistic\' ... Emerson’s associative, unpunctuated, and perpetually-surprising wordwork recalls a body that thinks, feels, and refuses to sit still—a body whose thoughts pour out in flaps, twirls, and echoes, each movement a kiss ... This is a lively text ... yes yes. This oft-repeated phrase anchoring the collection, as well as other doubled words, achieve distance from their pathologization as autistic \'echolalia\' and resignify as essential to the art of autistic being ... Autistic life is art. Emerson’s generative tangle with language reconfigures autistic bodyminds not as sites of emptiness, but as agents of creative transformation.
Hannah Emerson
RaveBarrelhouseIn spectacular bursts of movement and color, Emerson lives the gamut of autistic feeling ... Emerson’s associative, unpunctuated, and perpetually-surprising wordwork recalls a body that thinks, feels, and refuses to sit still –– a body whose thoughts pour out in flaps, twirls, and echoes, each movement a kiss ... This is a lively text ... The text repeatedly calls upon the reader to challenge our perceptions of embodied and enminded difference. It conjures generative opacity with its vibrant, tactile verse ... Moreover, Emerson is shameless, in the best possible way ... Emerson’s generative tangle with language reconfigures autistic bodyminds not as sites of emptiness, but as agents of creative transformation ... Throughout, we readers are held. We are invited to miss understanding, to fly, fall, and try again.
