Politics or Disease, please… by Sean J Mahoney

This is a stunning collection, technically proficient, verbally acute, outlining a vision that links the disability of the body with the disability of the nation and the nation’s politics.  This is not, however, a dour book; there is music and energy, beauty of metaphor and composition, the ha-ha’s of black humor, the brute bite of wit.  It is a book of intense, energetic questioning, of wonderings, and of compassion.  It is a book of poems that by a poet who knows his voice, and knows how thin is the line between truth and untruth, ignorance and inattention.  I believe that this is a book forged in love, seeking, for all of us, the good route between all the calamities that will lead finally to the place of our better selves.

–Bob Herz,  Editor, Nine Mile Magazine
email:  bobherz@ninemile.org
website:  http://ninemile.org
https://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com
https://soundcloud.com/bobherz
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-poetry/id972411979?mt=2

“The tongue does its best work untethered from polite conversation.” So says poet Sean Mahoney in Politics or Disease, please… and from first poem to last Mahoney tackles issues of politics, disability and disability poetics. Viewed through the lens of a daily life with MS, the poems in this book advocate ardently for disability rights while not yielding to the pressure to couch their language in pre-approved parlance, making them an important contributor to the conversation.

–Mike Northen,  Editor, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“The tongue does its best work,” Sean Mahoney writes, “ when untethered from polite conversation.” In these poems, the lost public promise of a benevolent nation is intertwined with the lost personal promise of an individual human body, and this collection urgently calls for a new way of speaking about disability and disease—as both personal and national conditions. Mahoney speaks of the “opacity of the familiar” and his poems often turn familiar tropes inside out, twisting and tweaking them until we hear the language in a new way—until we see what the old language has been hiding. It’s a powerful book, stunningly grounded in physicality and fact—the details of contemporary life—and filled with intense questioning, heart-piercing humor, and an unflinching voice. It will change you.

–Corrinne Clegg Hales, Author of To Make it Right

In Politics or Disease, please…the reader is given the privilege of watching Mahoney work.  Mahoney does the rare thing of commenting on his own writing.  His book is an exploration of form, beauty, disability, and inclusion. It is an important book by a wonderful, emerging poet.

–Jennifer Bartlett, author of (a) lullaby without any music, and co-founder of Zoeglossia.org.