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Lyric Bodies: Poets on Disability and Masculinity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susannah B. Mintz
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Abstract

This essay extends the study of disability and masculinity representations by exploring the transformational possibilities of poetry as exemplified in the work of Tom Andrews, Floyd Skloot, and Kenny Fries. It argues that lyricism as a process of invention and play enacts both disability and male identity as equally unfixed and that through an “accidental poetics” each author engages with maleness as a continually renegotiated experience necessitated in part by the conditions of disability. Challenging norms that pertain to them as men with disabilities, resisting the imposition of controlling ideological narratives, Skloot, Fries, and Andrews revise themselves as textual bodies whose unruliness is instantiated and celebrated in the unique structural and figurative moves of verse.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 2 , March 2012 , pp. 248 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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