Beautiful Mutants

By Adam Pottle

Categories: Poetry
Imprint: Caitlin Press
Paperback : 9781894759595, April 2011

Description

In this jarring collection, Adam Pottle cracks open the world of disability, illuminating it with an idiom that is both unsettling and exhilarating. His subjects are gritty and multifarious: amputee sex swingers; drug-related shootings; institutionalized adolescents coerced into sterilization. Difficult as their circumstances may seem, Pottle's denizens learn to navigate the world with creative resolve, even defiance, searching for an identity that includes their disabilities rather than spites them. His poems scrape our nerves; they test and undermine poetic forms, challenging our own sensibilities in the process.

Awards

  • Long-listed, Saskatchewan First Book Award 2012

Reviews

"Adam Pottle’s Beautiful Mutants—a striking, powerful debut collection of poems—is not just a book, it is a ‘city made out of language’ where words are the traffic. They yawp and jaw, nudge and quibble, zing, zip, zap—these poems are agile. And Pottle shows us that gaps and absences are replete with complex meanings. Like the blind woman who cranes her neck upwards to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, we see what can’t be seen. We hear what can’t be heard. Read this book."

— Anne Simpson, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize for Loop (2003)