This is a lovely collection of honest poems, exploring love and language and facing the self within a complicated body. I ended up buying a copy so I could share pieces with my students.

How to Communicate is a really interesting collection of poems that is well worth picking up if you are looking to read more in the realm of ability/disability or like seeing experimentation with form in poetry! Lots of interesting things going on here with language and words and how we communicate, as you can tell from just the title. For example, the first section, Slateku, mentions a form of palindrome that is possible in Braille when you are writing two things at the same time when making impressions on one side of the page to be read on the other. My favorite poems were probably the ones that refer to deaf and blind historical figures, such as "Line of Descent," "Etienne De Fay," "Nicholas Saunderson," and "Morrison Heady." There are a couple that speak to the way the author's ability is frequently underestimated, like in "On My Return from a Business Trip" when he is offered assistance, a wheelchair, directions, etc. and another poem that says "The Reporter Is In Awe / of a DeafBlind man / who cooks without burning himself! / Helen Keller is to blame." This also includes erasure poems that transform "problematic poems by famous and less famous known poets to tell a different story" and some translations of works done in American Sign Language and Protacticle which were fabulous. John Lee Clark has a distinctive voice and style(s) and I'm curious to read more from him!