Join us for the launch of Bad Weather Mammals (ECW Press) by A-E Best! With Therese Estacion and Emma Rhodes.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing,” Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite “ODSP 1, 2, & 3,” which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A-E Best is a disabled poet and essayist from Kingston. Her work can be found in the Capilano Review, New Welsh Review, CV2, Ambit Magazine, Mslexia, and Chatelaine. Her work was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Bad Weather Mammals, is now available from ECW Press. She’s currently the Editorial Coordinator for Arc Poetry Magazine and a Marketing Assistant for Brick Books. Find A-E on Instagram as @capitatelikeahead or her website https://ashleyelizabethbest.com/
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Therese Estacion is the author of a Phantompains—a collection of poems, published by Book*Hug, that explores her Filipinx heritage and disability. Phantompains was a finalist for both the 2021 Indies Foreword Reviews and 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award. She has been a guest editor for ARC poetry magazine and curated Smutburger’s 2023-2024 series. Therese currently teaches poetry at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and is a psychotherapist in training.
Emma Rhodes (she/her) is a queer writer currently living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is the author of the chapbook Razor Burn (Anstruther Press), a previous version of which was shortlisted for the Vallum Chapbook Award. She is a member of the Egg Poets, who published the chapbook All Things to Keep You Here (Qwerty). Her work has been published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prism International, Plenitude, and elsewhere. She works as a literary publicist, and is the Co-Editor in Chief of The Miramichi Reader.
