To enter the pages of Hardly Creatures is to find that you are not only welcome but anticipated. This debut poetry collection from Rob Macaisa Colgate is built for all kinds of readers—its form evokes a gallery space designed with access in mind. The poetic portraits of disabled communities that fill the gallery’s rooms are punctuated by accessibility icons and formally inventive poems that embrace the reader by inviting flexibility and extending care. Though each “wing” or section of the collection begins with an “Access Check-In,” this is hardly a guided tour; readers are encouraged early on to “Wander through the rooms in any order” and to skip as many as they please. Many of the poems are themselves commentary on the all-too-common barriers to making and experiencing art. “I Need a Minute” offers a largely blank page and an opportunity for rest amidst longer poems, while “Empty Frame for the Artist Who was Too Sick to Ever Finish the Work or Make It to the Gallery” foregrounds the bodily limitations of an artist. Poems denoted as multi-sensory replicas, sensory rooms, gender neutral bathrooms, and benches emphasize the embodied nature of reading by putting forth an expansive definition of access. The book simultaneously prompts readers to reflect on their own needs and to consider the bodies and minds of those with whom they share the space of Colgate’s poetic gallery.
This desire for community is at the heart of Colgate’s depictions of disabled life. The title of the poem “History of Display” situates Hardly Creatures as a rebuke to the long history of constructing disabled people as medical specimens and spectacles. Indeed, the collection offers a counterhistory of exhibition, illustrating disability from the vantage point of disabled people themselves. Through depictions of providing and receiving care, the poems coalesce to offer a vision of access that is at once affirming and vulnerable, nourishing and fraught.
In “Gender Neutral Bathroom: Ode to Pissing,” Colgate illuminates what activist Mia Mingus calls the “access intimacy” that, in this case, takes place on the toilet. Beneath the icons for “gender inclusive space” and “physically accessible,” the poem begins: “I go over to Lorraine’s on Thursdays to lift her onto the toilet.” Later we enter the bathroom at a concert, where friends drain catheters and empty ostomy bags side by side while singing along to the music.
Similarly, “Short Film: At Tangled,” recounts an accessible night out at Tangled Art + Disability gallery in Toronto, where Colgate was the inaugural poet in residence. The poem is labeled with twelve accessibility icons, including hybrid icons that ascribe multiple needs to a single stick figure, reflecting the poem’s focus on creating wide ranging forms of access. As with Hardly Creatures itself, there are many ways to experience the event: attendees are “in chairs or flopped onto cushions on the gallery / floor” with “the ASL speakers / and low vision folks alike gasping at the images and audio.” The poem captures both the chaos and the creativity that embracing diverse bodies and minds can entail: “It’s all possible, just takes a bit of trying.”
While Colgate’s collection celebrates the joys of collective access work, it also addresses moments of failure in poems including “Abecedarian for the Care Shift I Failed to Show Up For.” Colgate writes, “…depression is both what I felt after / forsaking you, but also what kept me from / giving you that ride to the doctor in the first place.” The poem candidly lays bare the tensions between affinity (“we both admit to it: overwhelmed”) and difference (“How to compare us:”) within disabled communities, acknowledging the conflict between two friends’ embodied needs while also lamenting this rupture. “You cannot tell me it’s ok, but you cannot tell me it’s not – / there is no right way to end this,” the speaker concludes, shirking the abecedarian’s alphabetical form and leaving this incident of unmet needs unresolved.
Colgate’s collection itself seems to have been borne of such moments when access fails. The opening poem, “We Do Not Enter the Gallery” conjures an alternative to the typical experience of visiting a gallery not designed for disabled visitors. In this inverted version of events, the speaker and their friends “do not,” we are told, “fail” or “feel bad.” Eventually they depart, perhaps in grief or frustration but also with a sense of possibility: “Leaving early, I do not begin to wonder what it might look like / If my friends and I built a gallery of our own. / I do not begin to wonder what it would feel like to belong.” The architecture of Hardly Creatures offers just such a space of belonging and generously invites readers inside.
POETRY
Hardly Creatures
By Rob Macaisa Colgate
Tin House Books
Published May 20, 2025
