Years before the world experienced a pandemic, you stayed locked in your apartment for eighteen months. You could not open the front door. Mental illness had smudged your life’s trajectory into a blur of updownupdowndown, until finally, upward deflated altogether. You thought you must be afraid of people, crouching underneath the windows whenever the mail carrier came. A compassionate psychiatrist will eventually correct this assumption. She says you fear the exact opposite: hurting anyone else. You will slowly recover. In tortured baby steps, you will venture out, further and further: from the mailbox, down the block, out, out, out, until finally, one day, you’ll remember how to walk the whole world again.
Lauren Russell writes, “In therapy, I have been asked to identify my core fear, the foundation on which my obsessions and compulsions have been built into a fortress of dysfunction. Mine is the fear of causing harm to others—or in its most profound iteration, of killing someone.” Her third poetry collection, A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close (Milkweed, 2024), breathes fresh air into the dense fog of neurodivergence. Replicating illness in gorgeous syntax, Russell assembles a puzzle box from the symptoms and selves forged by disorder. Window is a dovetail chain of poetic joints, poems interlocking to craft a human managing their conditions while wringing art out of their experience. Russell offers the reality of (not always) functioning with depression and compulsion, never sweetening bitter moments. Her poetry is a window of emotional transparency. You wonder how much easier life could have been if you, too, built a house out of yourself, instead of attempting to escape one. How much easier, if you wielded this book in your hands while standing before a closed door. Russell’s hybrid collection is powerhouse poetry, a lighthouse calling us out of the personal and systemic haze that surrounds a life with disabilities, without denying the resilience required every moment just to paddle back to shore. Window is lonely, wise, and necessary reading. We needed this collection decades ago, not only as a clear lens into neurodivergence, but as a study in human empathy for others and ourselves.
After a loved one gifts Russell with a bestiary, she gathers a collection of other animals: Moral Scrupulosity OCD, depression, autism, and tic disorder. Less taxonomy than poetic intervention, she recreates the exhaustion of coexisting with such creatures through hybrid writing. The beauty of hybrid is its capaciousness, breaking genre to prove the insufficiency of existent forms. Russell outlines the particular insufficiency of space for neurodivergent people in the world. A visual poem of prescriptions swirls in concentric circles, a single wedge of white space sliced away. A photograph of Russell’s handwritten journal reads, “As soon as you get near it, it leaps away from you and becomes tantalizingly invisible,” against statistics exposing the erasure of autistic women of color by the medical field. She creates breathing room by breaking genre expectations, so that everything invisible swoops into stark relief.
Russell locates a secret power in liminal spaces and overlooked cracks. Windows not only see through but see all themselves. A dress tears open in an act of desire. Blueberry-eyed lovers leave too soon. A sky bursts open with grief. Anxiety is all ears, popped “open like umbrellas.” Animals grow purpled by sunrises and sunsets. Russell crafts escape hatches everywhere: “Out of the black I carve portholes / with a view of more black.” Mining holes in her medical history and larger historical record, Russell critiques the inadequacy of the medical system while navigating the process as its subject of frequent suffering. The poet-patient grows impatient, rightly so. Russell must reassess the system inside and out, a double cruelty while held under the excoriating lens of diagnostics. She asks, “What happens if a tree falls in the forest and the story that might explain it doesn’t quite fit? Will we deny that there was ever a tree to begin with?”
In “Notes From a City Where No One Else Lives,” Russell analyzes physician Hans Asperger as a historical figure, who claimed he never met a girl with autism. She researches Nazi directives to euthanize the so-called uneducable and unemployable, alongside Asperger’s opportunistic career arc, rising during the expulsion of Jewish colleagues, then soaring once again when the Nazis lost their positions. Russell writes, “Shame does not seem to have gotten in Asperger’s way,” while noting, “To this day, whenever a new acquaintance asks me about my past, I try to divert the question. And sometimes I wonder if shame is what’s bolting the window of my loneliness.” You still dodge questions around your own medical history and wonder if shame is a sludge clinging to you as well. Why is shame an affliction and not an ethical imperative for those with the most power?
Russell lists devastation as poetic inheritance: “Breath. Pain. Fewer constitutional rights than yesterday.” While you read her collection, the head of the medical provider for the state of Florida announces “recent changes in diagnosis” requiring everyone incarcerated and diagnosed with gender dysphoria to be re-diagnosed. Compliance required, or force will be used. “Do you notice patterns in all things?” Russell asks. If you do not: why?
Russell refuses to hedge stakes as a someone diagnosed later in life with ASD: “As scholars of the Holocaust have observed, social death precedes literal death.” She flips the critical eye upon doctors, questioning an “ill-fitting” diagnosis formed after “a leading thirty-minute interview.” Examining a psychological evaluation performed on her at fifteen, she challenges each problematic assessment with repetition: “why did no one evaluate the statement . . .?” Why? Why? Why? Russell’s rigor points to the most exhaustive exhaustion of illness, more draining than pain itself. You must possess resilience to withstand the assessment and treatments administered by experts and their systems. The very thing intended to heal you will harm you, often enough.
Russell creates somatic punctuation, as if to underscore that everything begins and ends with the body: “Now your elbows are parentheses compressing inverted possibilities.” She leaves every window unlatched, shirking periods and right-hand parentheses for the em dash, or sometimes nothing at all. Clean endings flee her sensibility and syntax. One poem folds into another, like stacking symptoms or interconnected stories. Russell writes “a chain of love poems, a crown of near-sonnets in which the first line of each poem echoes the last line of the one before.” Then the poems transform into a twelve-sided die. Reading further makes you a player. “Now roll,” Russell dares.
In “The Doubting Disease: Moral Scrupulosity: OCD,” Russell accretes confessions and fears into constant mental assault, mimicking the fatigue of OCD’s pattern, one mis-exaggerated ethical responsibility building upon the next. OCD becomes a disorder of the imagination, stretched cruelly backward upon the poet. A cough from the next-door apartment must be a person choking to death (and it’s Russell’s fault). A jammed floppy disk in an internet café, “sometime between 2003 and 2005” might have gotten blamed on a staff member (and it’s Russell’s fault). A benign cough that might have killed an elderly woman in Rite Aid (and it’s Russell’s fault). Russell nails the disabling life of living with disabilities, not informed by a single event, but the overheated engine of a lifetime. The machine does not shut off. The mind runs and runs until smoke pours out. Then one day: boom. You’re done.
A slap from a stranger offers a practicum on Roland Barthes’s theory of studium and punctum in actual assault. Her writing reverberates with melancholy: “Is there a language of loneliness? / Is loneliness beyond language? / Is loneliness all language?” Beloveds offer restoration but also heartache. Russell grieves her feline lifeline, Rimbaud, with distinct tenderness. Their human-cat love rivals great romance, so much that a former girlfriend confesses jealousy over the relationship. After his death, Russell mourns Rimbaud’s psychological role as a tether to life, as much as his physical loss: “I’d had to keep myself alive to care for another.” When the external anchor is gone, what holds you here?
In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, “We don’t want platitudes or uplift or people telling us we’re loved. I mean, tell me. But I know I am loved. Sometimes hearing that helps. Sometimes I am still deeply, deeply sad anyway.” Russell speaks with generous candor on suicide. She finds toxic narratives around healing distasteful, including Styron’s “hopefulness” at the end of Darkness Visible: “my depression is not conquerable. It operates like an active volcano. It may stay still for long enough for me to begin to get comfortable, but eventually I will be covered in lava.” But the call to life offers an unexpected counterpoint to Russell’s lead blanket of depression, equally weighty: “with a shock [I] realized suddenly that I did not want to die after all, and so I would have to find some way to live.”
Russell offers a paradox. You must claim yourself. But you are not one person alone. You’re always part of a collective, and if you care for the whole, you must care for yourself. Russell prescribes expansion as a long-term treatment. “How can / BLACK LIVES MATTER / and not your own?” To protest is to insist that your own life matters too. Every protest is a protest against death. Likewise, you are not only the present tense but also the future to come. Russell collapses time in defiance of suicide. “Everything will have changed and everything will be exactly the same.” When the future brings uncertainty, the poet writes in the future tense, a guarantee that they will still be alive to see the next day. She will live on the next page. And the next. Notes on writing practice read like a director’s cut after the conclusion, as if to say: there is no ending. There is only more to do. Here’s the instruction manual.
Russell’s collection is a fire axe against ableism, white supremacy, and defunct medical systems. When she writes, “Every window is a caesura,” she also splits this window-caesura in two, guaranteeing an exit: “(can’t you see this gaping hole where a win- / dow was?)” Window blows the doors off disability writing by bending genre around the neurodivergent mind, reshaping typical forms. Contrary to her collection title, this window works: Russell breaks the glass with her poetry. Window is mandatory reading for hybrid aficionados, melancholy poets, medical professionals, and every patient sitting across from them. If you cannot see the way out, Russell reveals that every window becomes a door when you most need an opening.
