This chapter proposes a queer-crip genealogy in American poetry stretching from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to the present day. Through close readings of poems by twentieth-century poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and twenty-first century poets Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a queer disability poetics can be discerned and analyzed. This poetics is deeply concerned with identity, community, intersectionality, and resistance, and is characterized by themes of sexuality, witness, survival, and joy. Throughout this chapter, “crip poetics” is deployed not merely as a descriptor but as an analytic lens applied to poems that have been previously read primarily through understandings of disability as metaphor, alienation, or lack. Crip poetics instead reveals how disability can function as a source of connection, sustenance, and transformation in these poets’ work and in their worlds.

This essay considers Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond as an imaginative experiment with neurodiversity, considering, in particular, what it means to know, as we do now, that different brains are fundamentally, neurologically different and how neurological difference might have been narrated before there was a language for it. This is an investigation not of intelligence or mental health but of fundamental neurological difference and what it might have meant for the late eighteenth century United States, then a new nation politically organized through republicanism in which representative (white, propertied) men were expected to represent the needs of “the people” and trusted with governance. Ormond troubles the foundational formulation that American bodyminds simply required the right education and training to become, in Benjamin Rush’s words, “republican machines” able “to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” If republicanism was structured by a presumption of neurotypicality, Ormond presents a fascinating example of a novel working to represent different bodyminds during a time when there were not yet adequate narrative means for doing so.

American poets increasingly began to bring disability into their poetry in a more direct way in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with their embodied experiences living with disability, the work of many of these poets represents their involvement in the disability rights movement and disability culture and puts disability at the center of the poetry by writing primarily for disabled (rather than nondisabled) readers. I call the twenty-first-century poets who continue this tradition of disability culture poetry “crip poetry.” Examples discussed include Meg Day, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Amber DiPietra, Denise Leto, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, Constance Merritt, and Molly McCully Brown. In contrast, I call the twenty-first-century poets who develop disability poetics that are not written primarily for disabled audiences, and that are often based in other aesthetic movements and/or identities, “disability poetry.” Examples discussed include Bettina Judd, Airea Matthews, David Wolach, and Brian Teare.

This chapter uses Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2009 performance piece “The River” to provide an overview of queer disability studies in the United States. As with many cultural workers writing about disability from queer perspectives, Piepzna-Samarasinha complicates concepts of pride and identity; explores the effects of diagnostic categories; and yearns for queer crip futures. Sexuality plays a significant role in her piece, but Piepzna-Samarasinha avoids a straightforward narrative of liberation; pain, precarity, and debility co-exist here with pleasure. In order to situate Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work within a larger context of disability justice and queer disability studies, the chapter supplements her narratives with those of other contemporary theorists, artists, and activists. With an emphasis on the questions that queer disability studies poses for the study of literature and other cultural forms, the chapter attends to both the resonances and the friction between queer studies and disability studies.