Rob Macaisa Colgate : Hardly Creatures & My Love is Water

Today’s conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate is about two books, his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and his verse drama My Love is Water. You could say these two books are approaching the same questions, but from opposite, if complementary vantage points. Questions of care and disability, of accessibility and community, of Filipino-American identity and the afterlives of colonialism, of queerness and its intersections with race, of selfhood in relation to psychiatric medications, of cross-species solidarity, of questions of language and form, freedom and love and much more. We explore a Crip Mad Poetics and Disability theory in relation to the syntax of the sentence, the body of the poem, and in relation to the world-at-large. For the bonus audio Rob walks us through how he uses Google spreadsheets as a compositional tool. Reading down several rows of poetry drafts, cell by cell—cells full of recognizable lines of poetry, spontaneous asides, open questions, screenshots and more—he shows us how this process leads to the published poems we hear today. This joins an immense and ever-growing archive of bonus material, with contributions from everyone from Johanna Hedva and adrienne maree brown, to Layli Long Soldier and Victoria Chang. You can learn how to subscribe and about the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.