Contender of Chaos by Laureen Summers

“In her refreshingly unsettlingly collection of poems, Summers reflects on the rich complexity of her life as a sexual woman with a disability, a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, neighbor, intimate friend, weaver, and writer. The fullness of her life and the intense emotions she expresses in many of the pieces—desire, lust, love and anger—will persuasively challenge and powerfully undermine stereotypical views of what it means to be a woman with a disability.”

–Harilyn Rousso, disability activist, feminist, author of Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back

Laureen Summers’ poems speak in an intimate, vulnerable, straightforward and powerful voice. Tell their stories of bodies in motion in often simple declarative sentences that pop out of the uncertainty, turmoil, restlessness and greed of human existence in the 21rst century. Present vignettes of imaginary and real people.  Full of desire, anger, fear, humor, movement and change, brimming with great sympathy, they explore the universe of love in all its contingency, its storms, its swerving orbits. Contender of Chaos allows us to persist on planet Earth where “fragile lives hang in the balance between healing and despair.”

–Anne Becker, author of Human Animal

The title of the first poem in Contender of Chaos declares:  “This Is About a Body.” In the poems that follow, Laureen Summers maps the daily experience of that body’s limitations, reflecting on how we suffer, celebrate and in some sense re-create the bodies that we are. Her straightforward and often humorous lines direct us to recognize the challenges we share, as well as those particular to people who must rely on “messages from the brain that confuse their movements.” These poems speak of joy and note despair without giving way to it. Instead, as in “Hurricane Irene,” Summers recasts an instrument of disaster as a surprising model for strength and persistence: “She understood chaos… She was the woman of my dreams.”

–Beth Joselow, Poet; author of Begin at Once