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…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: Cancer and Caregiving in Heart the Lover by Lily King
In Heart the Lover, Lily King does the unimaginable: she crafts the perfect coming-of-age college love story, and then unravels and complicates it with a temporal jump into the future, a reunion sobered by time and cancer. Always a genius when it comes to capturing physical experiences on the page, King conjures cancer’s daily horrors…
Book Review: Liminal Spaces and the Moral Imagination in “Our Long Marvelous Dying” by Anna DeForest
Anna DeForest’s first novel, A History of Present Illness (2022), follows an unnamed medical student through tension-filled classroom and clinical years among more privileged classmates in New York City. DeForest’s follow-up novel seems a segue from the first. Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) also features an unnamed narrator–one further along in their medical career– seeking…
Pandemic Death Discourse: A Book Review
Pandemic Death Discourse critically engages the notion of “death as the greatest equalizer,” revealing how mortality, far from being neutral, exposes the deeply social, gendered, racial, geopolitical, and economic contours of life and death during the initial onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the heart of this collection lies a call to recognize and communicate…
Maggie Nelson’s Oral Examinations: On “Pathemata, Or, the Story of My Mouth”
After years of living with jaw pain, Maggie Nelson began to write about it. In her new lyric memoir, she describes her practice of cataloging the ebbs and flows of her pain as well as the process of accumulating information from various specialists. “I allow the / tapestry to widen,” Nelson writes as she adds…
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…
Book Review: Flood by Christine Kalafus
At the heart of Christine Kalafus’ upcoming memoir Flood (2025) is a powerful image: a rush of water, not a deluge from the skies but a slow rising from below, invisibly soaking through the porous foundations of an old house until, before you know it, you are wading ankle deep in what was the solid…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
“If Nothing” by Matthew Nienow – An Alphabetical Review
An Alphabetical Review of “If Nothing” by poet Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, 2025)
Capturing COVID-Era Isolation and Illness in Poems: A Book Review of “Days of Grace and Silence”
In her memoir Days of Grace and Silence (2024), Ann E. Wallace gives shape and resonance to her experience as an illness exile navigating long-haul COVID, from March 2020 through the spring of 2023. Wallace was the Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 2023 to 2024, and has written about illness, disability, and…