Curio of Wondrous Delights

I'd been peripherally aware of Dominik Parisien for a while--mostly through his editing of Uncanny Magazine's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue.

I'd even been vaguely aware of his poetry, through Amal, and even rhapsodically reblogged his "After Convulsing In Public"

But I'd no idea just what a remarkable poet he was until this weekend. Dream Foundry had their annual Flights Of Foundry convention--an entirely virtual sci-fi and fantasy con--and per my usual trend, I devoured way too much content, slept way too little, and added more to my already hideously bloated tbr pile.

Amid all this was a reading by Dominik--and even with a periphery awareness, something in his poetry already spoke to me, because I have a note to drop a couple panels in my schedule specifically to be alert for it.

I've been down an embarrassing profusion of rabbit holes, finding a reading snippet of his, trying to encapsulate the magic of that half an hour. Hearing Dominik read is like being a dragonfly in amber, forced to pay attention to nothing but the cadence and words you're surrounded by, forced for the length he's speaking to entirely center the experience of this disabled, queer man: he has a stage presence I've seen few poets rival.

And while I couldn't find a lot of readings, this one of "Convulsing" leaves me poleaxed every time.



The poem that struck me most was the prelude to his first collection:

Pain by any other name
Let us for a moment
call this pain by other words
Ask, how many roses does the hammer weigh
when it bears down on your skull?
Does the sword seem toothed like a toddler's smile
or sharp as your first iced skates?
On a scale of anglerfish to northern lights
how bright are the flashes in your head?
When I touch this, here, which constellations
light the sky behind your eyes?
Would you say that pulsing is the flicker of a satellite
or the stubborn heartbeat of a newborn chick?
Ask, can we for a moment make of beauty
the measure of our pain? And I will answer

The entire collection is structured around an attempt to answer and dissect that nearly unanswerable query.

I've been grappling for--a lifetime really--but about two years consciously with how to alchemize the struggle of disability. To find the beauty in my painstaking journey out of a fulltime chair to a walker and now a quad cane--the endless, ongoing work to make my body strong enough to live the life I desperately want to; all the while staring down the cliff of turning thirty as a nontrad student and wondering: in all the struggle, have I missed? my window of opportunity? will I even be considered viable within the professional world, starting so late?

There's so much pain in teaching a body to move: in strengthening muscles and pushing well past what you thought your level of endurance was. And even as we experience different kinds! of pain--mine from cerebral palsy, his from a convulsant disorder--the struggle for beauty was like a clarion horn call.

We talked disability poets--especially Canadian ones, which made me think of how much delphi would have enjoyed all this--, and honestly I probably dominated way too much time and virtual floor space. But it's so rare to see disability portrayed with the aim of centering our experiences, proclaiming our right to autonomy, while also acknowledging the grim realities.

I was shamelessly late to the next panel because I needed to buy his collection: Side Effects May Include Strangers. I'm utterly entranced, and have to fair warn that y'all will probably see more of his poetry in the next little while than you wanted to. :)