Cripping the poem: Visual and literary arts trans-disciplinarity in Hardly Creatures

The term disability poetics is often used to describe poetry that is simply about disability. Drawing from the concepts of against-access and cripping the arts, the present article explores the current limitations of disability poetics and suggests the implementation of visual arts accessibility practices as one path towards expanding the notion of what disability poetics can encapsulate. The article then introduces an excerpt from the author’s book Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), a collection of poems that uses the metaphorical form of an accessible art gallery to make its own attempt at translating the aforementioned visual arts accessibility practices across disciplines into poetic practice.