The best way to search for Deaf or ASL Poetry is to use the subject terms Deaf -- Poetry or the keywords deaf poet* or (ASL or "sign language') AND poet*. Check out the Sign Language Literature and Poetry guide. The CLIR grant project of digitized, captioned and voiced ASL Poetry and Literature videos is now available online. You can turn on or off the captions and/or voice. A comprehensive Deaf Poets InfoGuide is available.
Country of Glass by
eBook. Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book--which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures--attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.
Signing the Body Poetic
Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searing : a deaf poet restored
eBook. Laura Redden Searing (1839-1923) defied critics of the time by establishing herself as a successful poet, a poet who was deaf. She began writing verse at the Missouri School for the Deaf in 1858, and, under the pseudonym Howard Glyndon, soon found herself catapulted into national prominence by her patriotic Civil War poems. Abraham Lincoln himself bought her books, the most critically acclaimed being Idylls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion, published in 1864. Her poem "Belle Missouri" became the song of the Missouri Volunteers, and she was sent by the St. Louis Republican newspaper to Washington as a war correspondent. Despite her success, detractors decried her poetry simply because she was deaf, asking how she could know anything of rhyme, rhythm, or musical composition. She quieted them with the simple elegance of her words and the sophistication of her allegorical themes. Readers can enjoy her work again in this volume, which features more than 70 of her finest poems. They also will learn her feelings about the constraints imposed on 19th-century women in her epic narrative of misunderstanding and lost love "Sweet Bells Jangled:" Out of sight of the heated land Over the breezy sea; Into the reach of the solemn mist Quietly drifted we. Her restoration will be an event welcomed by poetry aficionados everywhere.
All the Names Given by
On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content. The collection opens with poems about the author's surname--one that shouldn't have survived into modernity--and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space--shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South--and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems--matured, wiser, and more accepting of love's fragility. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, in which the art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems as well as moments inside and outside of them. Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation.
Deaf American Poetry
Gestures by 
In Spite of Everything... by
For centuries, people have loved tales shared by poets--Homer, Chaucer, and many others. In the late nineteenth century, people were mesmerized by the tales of traversing the Bush Country of Australia as told meticulous detail by a deaf poet named Henry Lawson. In this collection of verses, poet Curtis Robbins--who is himself deaf--shares a tale of a group whom very few hearing people know about or understand. The poems in this collection present a story told daily among deaf people. They focus on the details and moment-to-moment experiences of what it's like to be a normal deaf person. Robbins explores the conflicts faced among deaf people, with hearing people, and on our own. He examines the inhibitions and exhibitions that are characteristically ingrained into the lives of deaf people. He also considers the work of deaf Australian poet Henry Lawson, celebrating his legacy. In this collection of verse, Robbins seeks to embellish, ostracize, epitomize, chastise, advocate, and reflect upon his own observations, thoughts, and visions about what it is about being deaf--without ever resorting to be invective but rather exonerating those realities.
Pathology, the Mis-Adventures of an Anti Hero by
A chronicle of poetry and personal imagery detailing the trials experienced by the frail psyche of a young woman.
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