In his debut collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), Rob Macaisa Colgate leads readers through a wonderland of poems dressed up in the form of an accessible arts museum. Inspired by the Toronto Museum Tangled Art + Disability that Colgate worked at during his Fulbright tenure, this book uses arts accessibility as an access point toward grander conversations regarding what it means to be a disabled person. With forms inventive and vexing, and content both ludicrous and deeply serious, the poems featured here don’t seek just to explain disability for the ego of able-bodied audiences but to manufacture a network of interweaving threads of the disabled experience: from the beautiful, the tender, the ugly, the violent, and everything in between.
Colgate is a disabled baklâ poet and playwright, who serves as a reader for POETRY Magazine and as the managing poetry editor for Foglifter. He received his MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 and since then has been honored with a Fulbright Scholarship, a
National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. In addition to his debut collection, in 2025 he is also publishing his debut play, My Love Is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse), and the chapbook FEEBLE (poetry.onl).
Colgate and I chatted over Zoom about his book, his poetry process, societal expectations of disabled people, and love poems as a place of rest. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Rumpus: You and I have been friends since graduate school. Can you speak about your poetry journey leading into disability poetics?
Rob Macaisa Colgate: When you and I started our MFA together in the fall of 2019, at that point I had really only had my [schizoaffective] diagnosis for about three years, or I had really locked into my madness for maybe three years, we can say, and I didn’t know how to talk about it or deal with it. But I tried a million things: I studied neuroscience in undergrad because I wanted to understand this and I thought, Let me try the science lens. And I didn’t like the science lens. So then I was like, Let’s do the poetry lens, but I didn’t even really know how to talk about it. And then part way through the MFA, I took a class with the fabulous disability theorist Alison Kafer, and that sent me on my disability studies journey. But even my first year of disability studies—we were also in peak quarantine lockdown in Austin—I remember having all this free time, and I’d lie there and stare at the ceiling and just try to think my way through basic disability justice logic. I would have so much trouble squaring it with these negative experiences. I am in stress a lot of the time, I’m in strife, I’m struggling. How is this supposed to be good? I spent a long time thinking about that.
Then I spent the back half of the MFA unlocking that notion that there might not be something wrong with me and that what was different about me might be good. The poems I wrote then were instrumental for figuring that out. Desire Disorder, which was my MFA thesis, was a product of figuring it out and writing. It was me coming to terms with myself as a valid existence as a schizoaffective person. And on top of that, I was also just going through so much boy drama constantly. So, it all squared together.
That’s what Desire Disorder was for me, and I think that’s what a first full manuscript really is. I love it when people’s first full manuscript, whether it’s a book published or not, is just an excavation of themselves. Having written that first manuscript as an excavation of myself, I was then ready to step out into the community and talk more about community stories or write very vulnerable personal poems like the Eli ones but know what was happening rather than going into them as being totally surprised. I mean.
I’m always totally surprised at the end of a poem, but I was still learning things about myself.
I had no clue, and Hardly Creatures had a little bit more of a solid basis. I had done the work of figuring myself out with the first manuscript, and I didn’t want to write the manuscript about the disability community until I felt like I was in a strong, stable enough position to speak for the community. Part of speaking for the community, of course, is being vulnerable in all the not knowing yourself totally and not feeling like you necessarily have answers or direction.
When you get into a relationship, you still have to figure out that relationship one step at a time. But it helps if you’ve healed a bit from the last one, there’s still going to be work and challenge and confusion always. But if you’re not grappling through your first trauma, it’s in a little bit better of a place. Hardly Creatures is a very second or third partner kind of book.
Rumpus: How did you find the framework of the museum for Hardly Creatures? What about the way the book is constructed ultimately felt most pertinent to the narrative you wanted to pursue?
Colgate: The museum format is directly based off an art gallery in Toronto, where I was working and volunteering while I was on Fulbright. It’s a disability arts gallery called Tangled, and it’s all run by disabled folks. All of the artists whose shows we put up are disabled. The content isn’t always about disability, but it is because it’s being made by disabled artists. When I started working there at the end of
2022, it was the first time I had really learned anything about arts accessibility, and I thought it was fierce.
Learning about arts accessibility was very eye-opening to me because coming from disability poetry, really all I had understood it as was poetry about disability. There’s this one big anthology of disability poetry from 2007. It’s very white, and all the poems are just lineated prose poems talking about being disabled. I just knew disability was a richer experience than that. The thing that really grabbed my attention was the fact that the art could be both about disability in contents, but also be made accessible, or disability friendly or disability engaged in how you experience it. I think the first exhibit we had up that really got me was called avere cura. There were a lot of recreations: sculptures of objects out of disabled daily life, and they were all sorts of plaster casts and things in resin and stuff like that. But it was sculptures of things like pill bottles and gauze and hypodermic needles—all these little sculptures, these little plastic plaster recreations you were invited to touch. They were all tactile-friendly, which makes it more accessible, not just for folks who are blind or low-vision, but also for folks for whom that’s a preferred sensory pathway. People who are stimming with their hands, who are neurodivergent.
And I was like, “Oh, this is like, disabled on so many levels.” And I was jealous because I felt I wasn’t seeing that in poetry, I was only seeing poems about disability. But I wasn’t seeing disability as a way of creating poetry, and the ethos behind Tangled’s curatorial practice is just that. My Fulbright advisor was a professor of disability arts—Eliza Chandler, she’s so brilliant—and her central question was, rather than taking art and making it accessible, what art happens when we lead with access?
The notion of disability poetics I was encountering the most was art made about disability. And I was like,
“How do we take in mind lived disabled experience as we’re creating literary art, using that as a guide?” The gallery started to happen because I first just tried to transfer individual access features into poetry, because I knew the poetry would be about disability. I knew that wasn’t going to be an issue, but I was wondering how to make it also accessible. The first one was thinking about those tactile replicas. I’m like, “All right, what’s a tactile replica of a poem?” You have to think in the figurative, because ultimately it is a book on flat paper. But I was thinking, “Okay, replicas. Right? What about an erasure where you have one part and then the same poem replicated, but slightly different because things were erased?” And so I was like, “All right, just erase anything that shouldn’t be touched.” And the words that are left are words that can be touched. After I started playing around with that, I was like, “I think I can do this with all the access features I’m seeing at Tangled, and that’s a structure for the book.”
Rumpus: Your book is not merely “poems about disability,” as you say, but often jolt the reader into reckoning with how they may be complicit in an ableist system. You do this in the poem “omfg,” where you have these lines: “listen do you even like poems or are you / just reading this at some coffee shop to / seem cultured omfg these poems will / not make you into a better person.”
Colgate: I’m so glad you asked about this poem. It operates in the book in which I knew that this speaker would run out of energy about two-thirds of the way through the book, because I run out of energy about two-thirds of the way through any endeavor. I knew the speaker would sort of crack, right? Because I think the speaker is being vulnerable, and is giving a lens on disability, as if through a clear window, with as little distortion as I could manage. The speaker can say that they’re just expressing themselves. But ultimately it does become labor to explain a marginalized experience to anyone else, marginalized or not. I knew the speaker would be exhausted from all of that.
The poem immediately follows a poem that’s a series of emails written by the speaker to their boss, calling out of work after crashing out, and so I knew there would be a poem partway through that mirrored the experience of trying to maintain energy as a disabled person. Because I did the collection to function as sustained lyric, but I think it’s impossible to sustain lyric forever. I wanted that sustained lyric to then mirror the disability experience. If there is going to be a poem in which the tone shifts, that’s a rhetorical device, the tone shift. But I want it to mean something within the content of the poem, and the sequence of the collection. How is that gonna make sense for this speaker who has been putting on this show? That is the book. It was really important to me that all my formal and rhetorical choices mirrored the disability experience in some way.
Rumpus: You have several diptych/triptych poems in here, including “Fashion!” “The Softness of Language,” and “Bench: Eli Plays Along.” Can you explain the impulse to play with multiple iterations of a poem within itself, with needing one or more attempts to say something?
Colgate: Two of them are burning haibun, which is a form that’s become so popular. I read a lot of these burning haibun—it’s the prose block, the erasure, and then the haiku, where the erasure is not revealing anything, and what is left that was not erased is revealing something that was under the surface in the first part. Sometimes an erasure is just a completely different home, and I want them to cohere.
In “The Softness of Language,” my friend Lorraine uses a power chair but also uses words like, “Oh, I was walking to work,” or “I was cooking breakfast,” and she was in her chair rolling to work which is walking for her, or she was telling one of her friends what to make for breakfast, which is making breakfast for her. And I was just so obsessed with her use of language, like, “Oh, yeah, of course, what else would she say? Why would she change it?” She doesn’t have to constantly create new language for herself if she doesn’t want to, if we have words that work perfectly well. For this poem, I wanted the erasure to reveal beneath whatever phrases she might be using that might be different or might be the same. There are very similar experiences under the first part which is me, Rob, and then the next part is Lorraine, and it’s showing us both having very similar days. But it’s me helping Lorraine through stuff.
And then Lorraine just doing it on her own. Because when Lorraine uses words like, “I cooked breakfast,” I am in the word erased out of that. But obviously I’m part of it, and that’s why the first part of the poem exists. I’ve talked about this poem before a little better, but essentially language is very pliable, very malleable, and the form of the burning haibun felt appropriate for showing that within individual words or descriptions of similar actions, even if they look different between first people, it’s ultimately the same experience under there.
Rumpus: Hardly Creatures discusses a wide range of disabilities, notions of disabled living, and disability access. How did the speaker’s specific diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and lived experience, take shape both inside and outside of the book?
Colgate: What can I say? I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, with a touch of schizophrenia.
I think some physical disabilities are easier for people to understand than some mental disabilities, and I think that a lot of folks with physical disabilities are really understood as disabled. And I do think there are a lot of mental disabilities that are much more understood as pathologies, as illnesses, as mental illness, and the notion of a content schizophrenic is more confusing and/or less familiar to a lot of folks than, say, a content powerchair user.
I think understanding the social model of disability is a little easier for some physical disabilities than it is for something like schizoaffective disorder. I spend a lot of time thinking about the physical space that mental disability takes up. There’s a poem in here called “Commute,” about Jordan Neely, who was a schizophrenic man who was murdered on the MTA in New York. I was thinking a lot about how on trains, we have seats that go up to make physical space for disabled folks, and people make space for them. People leave those seats empty if they can. They fold them up. Folks in chairs or with other limited mobility can use that space, and it’s not considered disruptive.
And then when mental disability takes up physical space, if someone is being loud on the train because of mental disability, suddenly there’s a line where that is not allowed. I think we’ve all seen people on the train like this. I think people feel very distant from someone who is loud and staggering on the train. As someone who, in psychosis, will be loud and staggering on the train—most of the time I’m on the train, I’m very sane-passing. And I see how people interact around me. And when I’m in psychosis on the train, I’m being moved away from, and I’m curious what might happen if we start allowing mental disability to take up physical space. If we can move out of the designated seating area for folks with physical disabilities, can we allow folks with mental disabilities to take up that volume or take up that walkway on the train, on the sidewalk, out in the world?
There is a line in “Commute:” “[E]veryone is either staring or avoiding, staring, and both feel like a slur.” And that is what it feels like sometimes. I’m curious about a world in which people are less bothered by the physical confrontation of mental disability, and that felt important when I was writing this book to have mental disability take up physical space in the poems and the pages.
I’m going to be schizophrenic, and I don’t mind. It challenges me, but so many things challenge me, and I’m fine with challenge as part of my life. Especially, because challenge so often leads to benefit or leads to feeling more in touch with myself.
Rumpus: The bench poems featuring the speaker’s partner, Eli, appear intermittently at key moments, often as a place of rest from the museum. Can you speak to the impulse and purpose of these poems?
Colgate: When I was learning about arts accessibility, some things were newer or a little more distant: I hadn’t heard of tactile replicas, I didn’t know too much about sensory rooms. But then there were some things I had never thought of as access, like a bench at the art gallery. People need to sit. I had a wonderful friend/peer/colleague at Tangled who would talk about everyone having access needs and say, “Cars are just giant mobility aids that everyone uses.” Benches really are like a crucial part of access in an art space. Of course, people with mobility limitations use those, but everyone benefits from a bench. We’ve all sat down on a bench at an art gallery that’s crazy. Everyone needs to rest. I knew the book would be divided into wings, and I knew in putting together a museum, you need a lot of benches. For this project I went to some museums, and they’re trying to be really artistic and austere, and there’s nowhere to sit. And that’s bonkers, because then that communicates to me that you don’t think disabled people can be austere. And I’m austere as fuck.
So I knew there had to be benches in every wing. And I was like, “Okay, well, what is rest in poem form?” A lot of these poems are challenging parts of disability. But what about love poems? I had just started dating my partner when I was writing this book, and what really set him apart from me as someone I was going to spend my life with was the wild and varied and unnervingly consistent ways he would show up to take care of me with my disability. It’s not easy to have a partner with schizoaffective disorder. All of my past partners know that. But my current partner makes it seem very easy. I was just in awe of how I was being taken care of, and I just love him very much, and I felt lucky that I found a way to just put love poems about my partner in the book.
It seemed very natural for the love poems to also be the moments of rest. I just so happen to have a ton of them that I was ready to write. I needed benches for the book. I needed love poems for myself. It evened out.
Early when I was writing this book and I was having to describe it for Fulbright and grant stuff or whatever, my big focus was access intimacy. Which is this intimacy that occurs when your access needs are met—like when you’re sick and someone brings you soup, that’s an access intimacy moment. When I started writing the book, I was very disillusioned with romantic love. So, I said, “Okay, no more romantic intimacy, only access intimacy. I’m going to get my good love from me and disabled people meeting each other’s needs.” And that certainly started to happen. But I think what truly unlocked sustainable, romantic intimacy for me was when it was paired with access intimacy. The most romantic moments my partner and I have had have been when he has been taking care of me at my worst. I wanted these love poems to carry as much access intimacy as they did romantic intimacy. For a lot of disabled folks, and then by extension, probably for a lot of able-bodied folks, access intimacy is really the way to romantic intimacy. If we’re thinking about cars as mobility aids that everyone needs, then when your partner gives you a ride to the airport, that’s access intimacy. That’s love.
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Author photograph courtesy of Rob Macaisa Colgate
