Reviews
Gut Botany is a work that feels. It is a confrontational yet comforting examination of human vulnerability and is highly recommended reading not only for scholars in disability studies but also for those in Performance Studies, Queer Indigenous Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer-Crip Theory, ecology, poetry, and American Literature. Much like Kuppers's other works, the generosity of Gut Botany desires imitation. As it celebrates acts of communion between land, human, and more-than-human species which often go unnoticed, we find ourselves there, learning of deep reverence, devotion, and healing., Kuppers carefully inhabits that electric moment where the two meet, whether she is holding a stick of rhubarb or dreaming of a dragonfly's "bristle foot pad hair." Given that we are all, even in quarantine, in an endless interaction with the world outside of us, these are the kinds of moments to learn to live in., Through a bold new empiricism--attentions drawn to surfaces, new ways to touch and understand touching, and thus new depths of healing--the human/more-than-human relation is rewritten. Gut Botany reveals a geospatial philosophy of radical connectedness., Kuppers' intentionality has remained strong but her lyric gifts have increased with time. Culture Gut Botany yourself and apprehend the growth., Gut Botany weaves disability, ecological, somatic, and performance poetry. Throughout, diverse human and more-than-human bodies touch with tenderness, violence, joy, and pain. Kuppers tries to be open to 'the all' and how all her senses 'layer and story' so she can write--'palm tingling'--toward healing, sanctuary, and love., In this beautifully designed book of experimental and surrealist poems, a reader is both tantalized and tortured as the disabled speaker uses language to revel in a lover's affection and eroticism., In these poems Petra Kuppers slides words into unexpected spaces following rivers of conscious memories and neural networks of unconscious motions. Places become political and politics become visceral. She weaves a way of being in the world with the forces that oppose it and edges of reality and sensation that serve to feed it. Reading these poems we find light, breezes, and resilience., Petra Kuppers's new collection is a wonder. [. . .] At turns beautiful and provocative, Gut Botany is a tonic against loneliness., Gut Botany is a capacious assay of corporeal life-support systems. A lingual choreography of interrelation and interdependence forms a generative phenomenology where every point of contact matters. Gendered, sexual, ableist, ecological, and colonial-settler violence is met with fierce and tender resistance. By disarming all forms of tyranny and extractivism, sustainability is possible. This is a work of immense transformative capacity. I am moved by the sheer responsiveness and receptivity that is involved when blooming out of line as a gender non-conforming nebula . Find sustenance in this generous resource of movement and change.
