My Body Is A Resource I Am Willing To Expend is a story of becoming: of learning what it means to care and be cared for, to love and be loved. In 2016, Katie (Tom) Walters caught fresher's flu and never quite recovered and developed a severely disabling, incurable disease. This debut collection exposes the process of acceptance, reconfiguring their relationships and finding their place in an increasingly inaccessible world. From their bed, they rebel in a world of sprawling plants and transcendental tenderness, where righteous crip pride collides with rage, grief, and mourning.
Katie is an autistic and physically disabled writer who creates performance poetry and interdisciplinary poetic storytelling for theatre. They write complicated metaphors about serious things, like sickness, loss, and love. Their writing is highly political, with a queercrip and cripplepunk ethos, aiming to tell challenging and subversive stories that destabilise the nondisabled norm. In 2014, Katie was a winner of the SLAMbassadors youth slam, and they've stuck to the stage ever since. They have performed at festivals including Greenbelt and Shambala, and worked on commissions for Homotopia and Theatre Absolute. In 2019, they co-founded the disability arts organisation Radical Body, where they produce radical new performances by and for disabled people.
Title: My Body is a Resource I Am Willing to Expend
Author: Katie (Tom) Walters
ISBN: 9781913958220
Binding:
Publisher: Burning Eye Books
Publication Date: 2022-05-04
Number of Pages: 76
Weight: 0.0681 kg
My Body Is A Resource I'm Willing To Expend takes you into a surreal world that mirrors the mental discombobulation that can occur with long term illness. There is nearly scientific attention paid to symptomatic details involved in illness, but they manage to make the traumatic bloom into the poetic by it dual focus of the body's machinations and the mind's adaptation to survive. A truly difficult feat superbly articulated by this young writer of note. - Roger Robinson; A timely collection exploring the dark and the light of disability, chronic illness and the deepest broadest fibre of human experience in powerful and appropriately contrary language. - Penny Pepper
