Jessica Suzanne Stokes is a disabled poet/performer/educator/scholar pursuing her PhD at Michigan State University. She analyzes contemporary poetry to crip methods for writing and reading. Jessica writes about disability poetics in Jacket2's "Discordance" Series. She is co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop. Her work has appeared in Wordgathering, The Mayo Review, and the book We Are Not Your Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology. Jessica has a purple wheelchair and too much red hair.
Authors | Jessica Suzanne Stokes
Articles on Amodern by Jessica Suzanne Stokes
SPEAKING OF MESSES
Stutter as Black/Crip Coalitional Method in Douglas Kearney's Poetics
“Speaking of Messes” analyzes the ways Douglas Kearney’s use of stutter aligns itself with both critical race and crip methodologies. With mess as his critical methodology, or, what I call a “messodology,” Kearney engages fragmentation, failure, polyvocality, and even stutter, as he sinks into the potentially fraught and generative tensions of disability and race. Using mess as a way to add multiplicity and meaning to his work, Kearney lingers with the possibilities of fragmentation that the stutter offers. By remaining attentive to practices of voice, individual specificity, and cultural expectations, Kearney’s work DISplays the necessity of a multiplicity of voices in cultural creation.