Books
Andy Jackson, Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying (eds)
Raging Grace
“Confession: I’ve always been somewhat of a soloist,” writes poet Andy Jackson. This approach has yielded him great success. In 2022, Jackson’s poetry collection Human Looking, which is about his experiences of Marfan syndrome, won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
But after he was awarded the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellowship, instead of pursuing the subject matter alone, Jackson sought out collaborators. He invited disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill writers from across Australia to join him for a series of workshops via Zoom. Together they wrote poems and essays, aiming to “diagnose the present and imagine therapeutic futures”. The result is Raging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability, edited by Jackson, Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying.
Raging Grace features the work of more than 20 writers, including Beau Windon, Robin M. Eames, Anna Jacobson, CB Mako and Jess Kapuscinski-Evans. The act of assemblage was not without effort.
“We were battling to be present,” writes Ottaway in her foreword. “During the meetings people had blood sugar attacks, migraines, vertigo, panic attacks, suffered through pain, left the screen to warm up heat packs and take medications, and attended while lying down.” Some navigated sensory overwhelm by turning off their cameras and speakers, communicating instead via chat, email or text. The workshops didn’t have set schedules, rather they ran to “crip time”. Attendees arrived late or left early, responding to the needs of their bodies. “And it felt, gloriously, like home.”
Unfortunately, as Ottaway acknowledges, truly accessible and accepting workspaces are exceptionally rare places for disabled creatives: “I’ve never worked in an environment like it.”
There is an exuberance to the works within Raging Grace, both in feeling and form. Words gush across the page – splitting apart, colliding and occasionally landing without linearity – as if a pressure valve has been released.
At times, it is unclear how some poems should be read. The layouts offer a multitude of possibilities. Reading becomes a process of inquiry. One of negotiating, testing and playing with the words to make meaning from the more unusual and hybrid forms. It is deeply satisfying. It is also the embodiment of living in a disabled body. As Ottaway writes: “We are used to being innovators, rigging workarounds, hacking the so-called ‘normal’ ways of doing things and of moving through the world.”
Humour is threaded throughout Raging Grace. The poem “Dis-topia”, written by Jackson and Alex Creece, satirises institutions and individuals who participate in “disability signalling”. Instead of criticising the practice, they welcome the abundance of emails that land in their “crippled” inbox. “The neurotypes sign up to therapy, eager to adhere to my social abnorms.” The language is luxurious and opulent – “they undertake my process of maddening, which is to say intensifying, glittering, honeying.”
The writers don’t shy away from detailing the realities of disability. Medical language – from diagnosis and disease states to medications and therapeutic regimes – rarely feature in the works. Instead, the writers focus on what it is like to live in the world. Rage isn’t sanitised.
“Anger is my lipstick lately,” writes Shying in the poem “Raging”, which was co-created with Sam Drummond. She details “The research, the planning, booking and funding – incontinence pants and hot packs for pockets” required to go out. But Shying’s anger isn’t directed at her routine, her body or her “hot pink wheelchair”. It comes at “the discovery of two steps others felt you could manage”.
While many works include mentions of somatic and psychic pain, the most pressing and urgent distress is caused by the healthcare system. “I have learned that you survive this medical system by pretending, going along,” writes Rachael Wenona Guy. “You crawl deep inside some cavern of yourself and wait it out like a wounded animal.”
The word “broken” echoes throughout the anthology. The repetition suggests a shared language, a shared feeling. In the spaces where language finds its limits, images of trees and branches and birds appear. So too, dragons and beasts and serpents. The success of this metaphorical language varies.
Then there are the phrases that have the wooden quality of a set writing prompt. In particular, “the future of health”, which appears repeatedly, and with little variation, in works within Raging Grace. The words that flow from this stiffly worded phrase often feel formal, ornate and reaching towards the academic. In repetition, the phrase becomes flatter still, weakening rather than strengthening the potential of wild imaginings.
Raging Grace works best when it is loose and wild and frankly weird, when the writers become “a church of anger, joy, grief, exploration and lust”. There are instances of specificity that have the potential to startle and inform the reader. In the poem “Crack and Burn”, by Sarah Stivens and Jasper Peach, appears the line: “I’ve never met a friend I wasn’t afraid of poisoning.”
In “My Raucous, Singing Ear”, Heather Taylor Johnson and Rachael Wenona Guy take the reader inside the experience of migraines: “The physio says it is very normal for people in my situation to become shop-shy – too much visual information to process, too many bright lights, the disorientating architecture of aisles.”
There is a lot to savour within Raging Grace. The content is prickly, persistent and urgent. The effect of bringing so many voices together feels defiant rather than definitive. As Stivens and Peach write, “When we gather in these numbers it’s impossible to feel less than because all I see – everywhere I look – is raging grace and powerful repose.”
Puncher & Wattmann, 124pp, $29.95
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 14, 2024 as "Raging Grace".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Purchase this book
Raging Grace
BUY NOW
When you purchase a book through this link, Schwartz Media earns a commission. This commission does not influence our criticism, which is entirely independent.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
