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BlazeVox, 2022
Chapters from Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir were first published in Raleigh Review, Split Lip Magazine, and West Trestle Review.
For a very long time we have needed Allison Blevins' lyric memoir, Handbook for the Newly Disabled. The lyrics are in quintets with titles such as "Brain Fog" and "My Neurologist (Who Doesn’t Have MS) Explains Pain Is Not a Symptom of MS." For a very long time we have been reading books by physicians instead of books by disabled poets. "This is the chapter about hope. Fuck him," one line reads. "I’m alive in Missouri," another line reads. Blevins' lyric memoir expertly talks back to medical ableism and, more than that, makes self-determination into an art.
—The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective and The Amputee's Guide to Sex
Allison Blevins’ lyric memoir, Handbook for the Newly Disabled, is a whirlwind of stunning and startling reflections on the body, disability, memory, and motherhood. Nostalgia blends with the present, a self trying to make sense of pain. “What is left in my body to confess?” she asks. Those of us who have lived chronic pain and illness will find ourselves understanding all too well. Those who haven’t will gain new insights into what a disabled life can feel like. “All of us will never be something we might have been. You see us smiling in our chairs, leaning on canes in commercials for pills and infusions. To love me, put your legs in ice.” Spending time immersed in the world of this book helped me, as a disabled person with chronic pain, feel seen and less alone.
—Alana Saltz, author of The Uncertainty of Light and Editor-in-Chief of Blanket Sea Press
Handbook for the Newly Disabled is a beautiful lyric memoir of disability: of the dailyness of grief, parenting, queerness, and pain in the setting of navigating illness. Allison Blevins writes gorgeously around, inside, and through illness, welcoming and challenging readers on every page, in every lyric turn.
—Krys Malcom Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child and Memoir Editor at Split Lip Magazine