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BOOKS

Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner

The poet Larry Eigner (1927–1996) was a key figure in New American poetry, which grew out of the Black Mountain School and San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the Language poets. Eigner also had cerebral palsy as the result of an accident at birth. It is fortuitous that the poet lived his life in two locations vibrant in both poetics and disability activism. Except for brief periods attending camp and school, he lived with his parents in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until the age of 51. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, at the height of the disability rights movement. In the 1950s, Eigner attended Camp Jened, which later became famous in the film Crip Camp.

Bartlett’s biography covers every significant phase of Eigner’s life: his childhood and young adulthood when he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with poets of the era; and after his move to Berkeley, the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators he established there. The result is a deeply insightful account of an utterly distinctive voice whose influence widens and deepens with each new generation that encounters him.

UA Press, 2023

The Hindrances of a Householder

Jennifer Bartlett writes, “a word here, a word there,” yet, somehow, never manages to write like anyone else. These poems concern themselves with the messiness of relationships and how those relationships operate in both real and fanciful worlds. Her poems comment on one another, on themselves, and on this fascinating character named Jennifer who weaves in and out of the poems. She writes about swimming pools, sex, neurology, the duality of names, and friendship. Along the way she offers no hindrances for the reader. Instead this book shows poems by a poet writing at her joyful, dizzy best. ––Mike James, author of Crows in the Jukebox and My Favorite Houseguest

Chax Press, 2018

Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography

Jennifer Bartlett 'makes the case'/ testifies to all the actual crap that being born with cerebral palsy entitles her to experience, and what life has been like/is like in contemporary America for her--given her lot--and then, in the second part of the book ('despite the facts') turns round and Celebrates Her Existence anyway: "AWAY WITH ALL THAT " she cries, petulantly and determinatively (waves her arm), and devotes the 'other half of the book' to her ordinary interested investigations/explorations of what is going on & necessary in her daily life in Brooklyn/New York, as if she were a real/actual/'extraordinary' sentient being (like everybody in a body) determined to 'understand' and attempt to 'know the whole of it'/what each can know from the 'absolute perspective' of each one's own organism. ––Robert Grenier

Theenk Press, 2014

(a) lullaby without any music

“These etched words take flight into the everyday of husbands and birds, crystalline reflection and self-possessed repose. Bartlett’s poems sparkle with unadorned being and sardonic becoming. Till we become ourselves in their reflection, refigured as beauty.”—Charles Bernstein
“The crosshatch of love, place and domesticity. A woman wearing, then shedding, the identities of body, mother, wife, daughter, bird and lover. Jennifer Bartlett’s (A) LULLABY WITHOUT ANY MUSIC proves, once again, that she is the nightingale in the city, and we are all richer for it.”—Maryrose Larkin

Chax Press, 2012

The book cover of "Beauty is a Verb." It shows an image of a woman in a red wheelchair, fully underwater, on the bottom of a pool. She has long dark hair that is stretching out behind and above her, and is wearing a black-and-white dress and sunglasses. Bubbles are escaping from her mouth. There appears to be an oxygen tank attached to her wheelchair, although it is not in use. Around her, the water is blue, and the tiled floor of the pool is white and blue.

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both.

Crip Poetry.

Disability Poetry.

Poems with Disabilities.

This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace.

For the reader of good poetry interested in the diversity of American expression, this anthology provides an understanding of the history and contemporary vitality of the poetry and poetics of the non-normative body.

Cinco Puntos Press, 2011

Derivative of the Moving Image

"Jennifer Bartlett has created not a new form of surrealism, nor of magical realism, but a kind of supernal realism which leaves room for dreams, visions, and angels as well as the panoplies of both country and urban life. These realia attribute a marvelously textured, immediate, and linguistically inventive ground to all she writes. The overcoming, without fuss, but with a brave, almost saintly decorum, of a young venture far too burdened by tragedy and disability is the deep subject of this book: a life has visibly been saved, and built, by poetry. One welcomes with delight this brilliant new talent." ––Nathaniel Tarn

University of New Mexico Press, 2007