A Fate Worse Than Death

Nisha Patel is a queer BIPOC poet of South Asian descent. She is the author of the acclaimed 2021 collection Coconut, published in Canada by the indie NeWest Press (with limited US distribution). This, her second collection, deals specifically and honestly with how she navigates her various disabilities (treatment-resistant diabetes, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, and complex chronic pain) based on an examination of her personal medical records over the last 10 years. Disability is a subject that Arsenal is well versed in, having published successful titles by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (including The Future Is Disabled, Care Work, and their poetry collection Tonguebreaker), Zena Sharman (The Care We Dream Of and The Remedy), and Shayda Kafai (Crip Kinship). We were impressed by Nisha’s book for the intimate power of her poems, many of which are visual poems that feature medical records, psychiatrist memos, drawings, and even Wikipedia and Google pages. Nisha’s work draws us into her world in which she lays her vulnerabilities bare, acknowledging her grief and anger over treatment and neglect while accepting and embodying hope and joy in a disabled body. In Nisha’s own words: “While I have lived with illness for most of my life, I have always felt that the story of illness, on how to be ill and who gets to talk about it, always fell on bodies that did not look like mine. As I learned about research-heavy poetry that could be made from archival material or history, I decided to use my own medical records as the first place of inquiry into my stories. What I uncovered in requisitioning and reading these records was a deep, underlying bias and dehumanizing relationship between care providers and patients, and the many ways my emotional experiences had felt invalidated. As I entered academia as a graduate student, I also developed a severe and complex pain that made me less able to use my body. It was in that period that theorizing around the possibilities of how much disability can be desired and reclaimed affected me, and I re-wrote the book to act as a reflection of the present but also a distillation of disabled futurity.” Nisha is well known in the spoken word circuit (mostly in Canada but some in the US). Her first book was published during the pandemic and she wasn’t able to tour in support of it, so it’s our intention that she tours for this one.