Allison Blevins is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of the previous collection Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir, and the chapbooks Chorus for the Kill, Susurration, Letters to Joan, and A Season for Speaking, part of the Robin Becker series. She is also the founder and director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana, a literary review. In Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) she writes, “If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger,” a reasonable creed for navigating a life demanding passivity toward the violence and loss it inflicts. Explored here are the plights of mothers, daughters, lovers, and spouses in a voice that endures scars and calluses but refuses to accept them as necessary. Infertility and motherhood, memory and loss, and love and infidelity are also examined, and she conjures poems from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society website, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
