 | |
| Author | John Lee Clark |
|---|---|
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publication date | December 6, 2022 |
| ISBN | 978-1324035343 |
| Followed by | Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays |
How to Communicate: Poems is a debut 2022 poetry collection by John Lee Clark, published by W. W. Norton & Company. [1] It won the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry and was designated as a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry. [2] [3]
Clark is a DeafBlind person who lost his vision during his adolescent years and an advocate of the Protactile language, a touch-based language. Clark writes extensively on Protactile in his other book, Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays. [4]
Clark's debut poetry collection, in six parts, similarly addresses DeafBlind identity, linguistics, family, and community through its poems. It also includes translated poetry from Protactile and American Sign Language.
Many critics lauded Clark's approach to touch. For the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Kristin Snoddon said "How to Communicate is full of such surprises and revelations. It pulses with life. I recommend it for all scholars of disability, language and literature, and anyone seeking to draw inspiration and understanding from alternate ways of engaging with the world." [5] RHINO wrote that "Clark depicts the importance of touch in communicating with people and his surroundings. He does this both through his own experiences and by showing the power of an often-undervalued sense." [6] Wordgathering stated "In his stunning, freeing, and riveting debut poetry collection, the reader immediately encounters the bold and vivid juxtaposition of Clark’s aesthetics and politics." [7]
Other critics said Clark's work was pushing the boundary of poetry's possibilities. The Los Angeles Review of Books observed Clark's "poetics rooted in DeafBlind sensibility" and said "Many of the poems in How to Communicate are reimaginings of problematic and ableist poems about Deaf and blind people from earlier eras; in one section of the book, Clark offers translations in English of poems originally composed in Protactile or American Sign Language." [8] Long River Review said "All in all, I think that poets like John Lee Clark are completely changing the genre of poetry– and they should be more highly recognized because of it." [9] Rain Taxi concluded that "Clark hasn’t just put his life into verse and prose poems; he’s felt and manipulated and explored and expanded what poetry in English—in print, to the ear, on the fingertip—can do." [10]
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as a cultural label, especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d. Carl G. Croneberg was among the first to discuss analogies between Deaf and hearing cultures in his appendices C and D of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language.
Tactile signing is a common means of communication used by people with deafblindness. It is based on a sign language or another system of manual communication.
Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman was the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, forty-five years before the more famous Helen Keller; Bridgman’s friend Anne Sullivan became Helen Keller's aide. Bridgman was left deaf-blind at the age of two after contracting scarlet fever. She was educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind where, under the direction of Samuel Gridley Howe, she learned to read and communicate using Braille and the manual alphabet developed by Charles-Michel de l'Épée.
Ilya Kaminsky is a poet, critic, translator and professor. He is best known for his poetry collections Dancing in Odesa and Deaf Republic, which have earned him several awards.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Tangible symbols are a type of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) that uses objects or pictures that share a perceptual relationship with the items they represent as symbols. A tangible symbol's relation to the item it represents is perceptually obvious and concrete – the visual or tactile properties of the symbol resemble the intended item. Tangible Symbols can easily be manipulated and are most strongly associated with the sense of touch. These symbols can be used by individuals who are not able to communicate using speech or other abstract symbol systems, such as sign language. However, for those who have the ability to communicate using speech, learning to use tangible symbols does not hinder further developing acquisition of natural speech and/or language development, and may even facilitate it.
Laurie Clements Lambeth is an American poet, specializing in the topic of disability. She was raised in Laguna Beach and Palos Verdes, California. She graduated from the University of Houston with an MFA and PhD. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, and The Iowa Review. She lives in Houston, Texas.
Sophia Kindrick Alcorn was an educator who invented the Tadoma method of communication with people who are deaf and blind. She advocated for the rights of people with disabilities and upon retiring from her long career in teaching, she worked with the American Foundation for the Blind.
Sheila Black, an American poet, has written over 40 books for children and young adults as well as four poetry collections. She was a 2000: U.S. co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, and a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship.
Millicent Simmonds is a deaf American actress who starred in the 2018 horror film A Quiet Place and its 2020 sequel A Quiet Place Part II. Her breakout role was in the 2017 drama film Wonderstruck. For Wonderstruck and A Quiet Place, she was nominated for several awards for best youth performance.
A Quiet Place is a 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror film directed by John Krasinski. The screenplay was written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods from a story they conceived, with contributions by Krasinski after he joined the project. The plot revolves around a mother and father (Krasinski) who struggle to survive and raise their children in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind extraterrestrial creatures with an acute sense of hearing.
Raymond Antrobus is a British poet, educator and writer, who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019, he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection The Perseverance, praised by chair of the judges as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.
James Morrison Heady was an American deafblind author. Heady published multiple volumes of children's books and poetry and was frequently referred to by the contemporary press as the "Blind Bard of Kentucky". He was one of the first advocates for books for the blind in the United States and he invented several devices to facilitate communication and improve quality of life for deaf and blind people.
John Lee Clark is an American deafblind poet, writer, and activist from Minnesota. He is the author of Suddenly Slow (2008) and Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience (2014), and the editor of anthologies Deaf American Poetry (2009) and Deaf Lit Extravaganza (2013). Clark was the recipient of a 2020 National Magazine Award. He is a prominent activist in the Protactile movement.
Protactile is a language used by deafblind people using tactile channels. Unlike other sign languages, which are heavily reliant on visual information, protactile is oriented towards touch and is practiced on the body. Protactile communication originated out of communications by DeafBlind people in Seattle in 2007 and incorporates signs from American Sign Language. Protactile is an emerging system of communication in the United States, with users relying on shared principles such as contact space, tactile imagery, and reciprocity.
Afterland: Poems is a 2017 debut poetry collection by Hmong American poet Mai Der Vang. It was published by Graywolf Press after Vang won the Walt Whitman Award in 2016, which included publication as a prize. Vang's manuscript had been chosen by Carolyn Forché. The book later went on to be a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
The Rupture Tense is a 2022 poetry collection by Jenny Xie, published by Graywolf Press. Motivated by Xie's visit to China in 2019, the book's poem discusses her Chinese American identity alongside the broader history of the Cultural Revolution. It was nominated for several prizes and won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award.
The Undressing is a 2018 poetry collection by Li-Young Lee, published by W. W. Norton & Company. His fifth collection, it was Lee's first book in a decade since his 2008 release, Behind My Eyes.