"Dazzling. . . . An extraordinary document in care, mutual aid, and access."-Claudia Rankine
An imaginative and unforgettable debut poetry collection about the joys and complexities of the disability community from 2024 Ruth Lilly fellow Rob Macaisa Colgate.
Brilliant and innovative, Rob Macaisa Colgate's debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, takes the form-visually and metaphorically-of an accessible art museum. Through nine sections that act as gallery rooms, the book shepherds the reader through the radiance and mess of the disability community.
At the heart of the collection is an exploration and recognition of access intimacy. Marked with universal access symbols to guide the way, poems mimic sensory rooms, tactile replicas, benches for resting, and more; "the body of a poem" itself is reimagined through formal experimentation, as abecedarians are scrambled out of order and sestinas are pressurized into new sequences. These poems also play with pop culture allusions, social media posts, and the infinite possibilities within queer love and deep friendships. With lyrical clarity and attention to language, Hardly Creatures reaches out and offers inventive, heartfelt insights for all readers, and celebrates the disability community through the lens of a visionary new voice in poetry. Exciting, sometimes shocking...[an] astonishing first book.-New York Times
Innovative…. an impressive titan of formalism and radical inclusion.-Electric Literature, A Best Poetry Collection of 2023
The joyfully inventive debut honors the disabled community…. Colgate's generous and perceptive poems make an impact.-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Expands the limits of the poetic form…. From poems that mimic sensory rooms and scrambled abecedarians to inventive plays on social media posts and culture allusions, Hardly Creatures shows readers the limitless possibilities poetry has to reimagine and reach new heights.
-Chicago Review of Books
Wide-ranging in tone and topic, these poems lead by example, showing us how the world could be, how a book could be.... More than poetry, it is possibility. Colgate shows us the potential of art that not only allows for us, but actively welcomes us into its fold.-North American Review
'Remember that you are meant to be here. / You must allow yourself to exist / in whatever way you have arrived to the space' This was an invitation I received upon entering Rob Macaisa Colgate's Hardly Creatures, a collection unlike any I have ever encountered before. Part primer, part activated art space, part personal/community inventory, part lyric collaboration with mental illness-this book activates new zones between disability studies and poetry, allowing readers spaces for rest, recognition, and reimagination inside its dazzling and varied forms. An extraordinary document in care, mutual aid, and access that positions the self (all selves) as existing inside a network of interdependence
-Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
Stunning and tender . . . full of vulnerability and humor and lyrical play.-Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City
Brilliant . . . I felt my entire world shift, soften, begin to glow.-Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency Rob Macaisa Colgate is a disabled, bakla, Filipino American poet from Evanston, Illinois. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from UT Austin. Poems from this collection appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Best New Poets, New England Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright scholar, Rob currently serves as the managing poetry editor at Foglifter.
