Crip Contours: Space and Embodiment in 21st Century American Disability Poetry of Jim Ferris, Stephen Kuusisto and Laurie Clements Lambeth

This PhD will interrogate the poetry of Jim Ferris, Stephen Kuusisto and Laurie Clements
Lambeth and explore their work’s relationship with space. Their work engages the attention of
fellow poets, academics and readers in conversations which challenge established ideas about
embodiment, space and community through a focus on their own personal experiences. I argue
that the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) legislation, the temporal starting point for
this project, placed a renewed focus on how society and theorists think about space in relation to
disability. I examine how the three poets use innovative metaphors of space to explore the
transition from being a young person to an adult and to articulate the physical, psychological,
emotional impact of medical, societal and cultural conceptions of disability that intersect and
define their sense of self. I trace space through the institutional spaces of the hospital in the
verses by Ferris, in the representations of space in the natural and cityscapes in the poetry of
Kuusisto, and in the various poetic works by Lambeth which focus on her evocation of the body.
To this end, I employ a new literary spatial concept of “crip contours” which I define as an
original way of seeing space from a crip perspective. The term is expressive of the spatial
outlines contained in the form of outer and inner corporeal surfaces and the meeting points where
bodies intersect with objects, others and their situated practices. I demonstrate how a crip
perspective can be understood as an alternative way of perceiving the spaces of the body as a
form of “crip contour” which are re-imagined and reconfigured by contact with disability. I
explore how these “crip contours” work in the poetry of Ferris, Kuusisto and Lambeth.