Bad Weather Mammals

“Within Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s tightly woven collection, when “the world became a waiting room,” when medical sexism, life in a disabled body, family dynamics, and gender-based violence made it ‘easier to trust in your suffering,’ Best shows us there is also joy; new love, pillow forts, butterflies. Bad Weather Mammals is an evocative and emotionally open book that understands ‘it is a privilege to have a story’; indeed, it is also a privilege to read this story. Best shows us the mould swelling the walls, the ‘comma of blood on the pillow,’ the teeth marks on the cheese block, and we are lucky for it.” — Conyer Clayton, author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves“In the unflinching, rebellious candor that is Bad Weather Mammals, Ashley-Elizabeth Best confronts and exposes the perplexing medical-industrial complex that promises ‘life in this diagnosis… Then they leave you like this’—and into the interior of (human) nature we go: ‘even in the / earliest / deposits of river veins, within our nature are traces of animal / nostalgia.’ Best asks the hardest of questions in this love letter of a collection to the chronically ill, to those grappling with contemporary life: ‘To live is to bear it. / I pluck a leaf from / the maple tree out back, a thousand hands clapping / into the chorus of the wind.’ Experimenting with form, structure, and the body itself as ‘no longer the limit,’ Best threads together intense family dynamics, taking us from ‘the tornado spiral cowlick, her nails bedded into the flesh of my knee’ right into the ‘gut of its wanderings swells with arteries of fish.’ Don’t look away. Don’t come for easy answers. Take your time with Bad Weather Mammals, and listen, especially carefully, when Best asks: ‘Where does the story pick up, where do my poles strengthen?’” — Rosebud Ben-Oni, winner of the Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery“The poems in and across Bad Weather Mammals represent an unfolding, an unfurling, of reclaimed and repurposed self, despite and through whatever else had been, has come, and still is.” — rob mclennan’s blog“As I read Bad Weather Mammals amidst headlines that report increased legislative scrutiny on the rights of queer and disabled individuals, I am amazed by the pertinence of Best’s writing. Each poem illustrates how the intersection of various identities — femininity, disability, trauma — in one’s life leaves an invisible stamp that defines how they are treated politically and interpersonally.” — Contemporary Verse 2

Ashley-Elizabeth Best is a disabled poet and essayist from Kingston, ON. Her work can be found in the Capilano Review, New Welsh Review, CV2, Ambit, Mslexia, and Chatelaine. Recently, she was a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for Poetry.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.