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Poetry that inhabits and queers bodies and lands in an ecosomatic investigation.

About the Author

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a professor of English and women's studies at the University of Michigan. She is author of the poetry collection PearlStitch, the queer/crip speculative story collection Ice Bar, and multiple academic books. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a community arts space.

Reviews

Gut Botany is a work that feels. It is a confrontational yet comforting examination of human vulnerability and is highly recommended reading not only for scholars in disability studies but also for those in Performance Studies, Queer Indigenous Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer-Crip Theory, ecology, poetry, and American Literature. Much like Kuppers's other works, the generosity of Gut Botany desires imitation. As it celebrates acts of communion between land, human, and more-than-human species which often go unnoticed, we find ourselves there, learning of deep reverence, devotion, and healing.-- "Review of Disability Studies"

Gut Botany weaves disability, ecological, somatic, and performance poetry. Throughout, diverse human and more-than-human bodies touch with tenderness, violence, joy, and pain. Kuppers tries to be open to 'the all' and how all her senses 'layer and story' so she can write--'palm tingling'--toward healing, sanctuary, and love.--Craig Santos Perez

In this beautifully designed book of experimental and surrealist poems, a reader is both tantalized and tortured as the disabled speaker uses language to revel in a lover's affection and eroticism.--Kimberly Ann Priest "Black Earth Institute"

Kuppers carefully inhabits that electric moment where the two meet, whether she is holding a stick of rhubarb or dreaming of a dragonfly's "bristle foot pad hair." Given that we are all, even in quarantine, in an endless interaction with the world outside of us, these are the kinds of moments to learn to live in.--Dennis James Sweeney "The Massachusetts Review"

Kuppers' intentionality has remained strong but her lyric gifts have increased with time. Culture Gut Botany yourself and apprehend the growth.--Shane Neilson "Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature"

Kuppers's writing is additive, even multiplicative, rather than subtractive or divisive. The book explores myriad forms violence, but also makes room for bodies touching other bodies in wonder and in love.--Camille Dungy "Orion Magazine"

Petra Kuppers's new collection is a wonder. [. . .] At turns beautiful and provocative, Gut Botany is a tonic against loneliness.--Addie Hopes "Edge Effects"

The poems in Gut Botany stiffen moods. They make their meaning out of fleeting feelings that suddenly sit up and hold their forms. There's pleasure to be taken in the examination this makes possible, but there is danger, too.--Ezra Dan Feldman "Gertrude Press"

This collection of poems does more than just suggest a poetics of disability, it pushes all of us engaging in disability studies--students, teachers, activists, and artists--to feel more critically through our own physical movement in, and embodied relationships to the spaces we inhabit.--Jose Miguel Esteban "Disability Studies Community Blog"