Eli Clare’s new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (2025), presents a challenge to disability studies. The most impactful challenges to this field over the past few decades have critiqued its narrow focus on whiteness, the West, and physical disability, with more recent work attempting to understand disability through intersectional and global frameworks as well as disabilities that are imperceptible and intermittent. Clare’s previous works have also offered such challenges. He emphasizes in his first book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999), the absolute necessity of “building a politics that reflects all the multiplicity in our lives” (xxv). In his second book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017), Clare writes against a white, Western medical notion of cure, tarrying with the irreconcilable contradictions that exist between desiring and resisting cure both outside and within the category of “disabled people.” Clare’s work has thus been instrumental in revealing the limits of disability studies and pushing the field beyond those limits.
Part of the challenge presented by Unfurl concerns the ways in which disability is represented and discussed. Early in the book, Clare writes a “messy” love song to scooting and crawling. He notes that the disability community rarely talks about these modes of mobility that bring them to close to the ground, relishing instead new gear targeted at mobility and “gimpy ways of walking” (27). Clare admits that this absence has left him feeling alone. He seeks to shift the conversation: moving close to the ground is not, for Clare, cause for feelings of shame or humiliation but rather pleasure. Moreover, he explains that moving close to the ground has led him “deeper into intimacy with the more-than-human world” (28). Here, Clare challenges us to broaden our understanding of access, longing for a kind of access that creates intimacy and vice versa. When “access intimacy” occurs he finds that his relationships with humans and the nonhuman, from animals to vegetation to rocks, grow stronger.
Unfurl’s primary challenge concerns access. Indeed, Clare makes clear that access practices “ground” this book (ix). He emphasizes that accessibility – from accessible language to multiple formats to content notes to pauses, and more – is the bedrock, shaping every page: the words, the ideas, the stanzas and paragraphs. Clare notes that such strategies will determine who can read his book. He seeks to make Unfurl as accessible to as many people as possible through the use of accessible language. On the one hand, Clare intentionally avoids academic jargon. His concern – drawing on his own difficulties remembering the definitions of specialized terminology – is that the use of words with convoluted meanings will function to shut people out. As it concerns his poetry, Clare admits that some readers might feel excluded, as if they are running into a barrier. He encourages these readers to give themselves space and to experiment, stressing that there is no “wrong” or “stupid” way to absorb the book.
To further assist and guide readers, Clare offers “format notes” that verbally describe the shapes that the more visually inaccessible poems take. At times he notes that lines are “anchored” to a margin; at other times he describes words as “scattering;” and, at others, he describes how “expansive” space surrounds text. He also added notes about historical events but only a few definitions so that words like “ableism” and “transphobia” could be understood and felt through the accumulation of wisdom. He includes many of these notes in the main body of the book (rather than, for instance, including the format notes as an alt text, which would only be available to people using screen readers). Clare notes the novelty of such notes, remarking that he has never encountered such access practices before. He expresses the hope that other writers will adopt these practices.
Clare admits that such access practices are never complete. For instance, he explains that he does not embrace the specific standards of plan language. Although, he does stress that he wants to learn the rigor that such language requires. Clare pushes back against those who would use the incompleteness of access practices as an excuse to abandon such a mode of composing. As he earlier did in a note that preceded Brilliant Imperfection, Clare spends much time contemplating the use of trigger warnings, which he refers to as “particularly confounding” (xxii). Learning from conversations with other writers and activists, he admits that he has “not successfully answered the question of what to tag and how” (xxi).
Clare goes on to persuasively defend his access practices with recourse to the need to care for others and ourselves. He refers to content notes, like naming potential triggers, as “an act of collective care” (xxii). Clare also weaves pauses, often double pauses (“pause pause”), into his writing, particularly in section II, which deals with grief and trauma. He refers to this practice as “self-care,” describing how it allowed him while writing to make space to drink water and cook, walk and nap, and even breathe. Clare ultimately decided not to tag individual pieces but rather to include general content notes at the end of the title page of each section. What he demands from himself as well as all of us is not perfection. Clare dreams of a world in which access practices are so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives that they no longer require a name. Until then, he advises us to “keep practicing” (xxiii). Unfurl offers a model for how during the “until then” we can write with care for as many possible others as possible.
Works Cited
Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfections: Grappling with Cure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
—. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
—. Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.