Beautiful Mutants

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.

AUTHOR

Adam Pottle

Born Deaf and raised in a hearing family, Adam Pottle spent his childhood searching for magical portals and pretending to be Godzilla. He is the award-winning author of works in multiple genres, including the acclaimed writing memoir Voice and the Deaf horror novel Apparitions. His plays include the groundbreaking works Ultrasound and The Black Drum. When not writing, he can be found at the boxing gym, the library, or the park with his goldendoodle Valkyrie. He lives in Saskatoon.

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)