“The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing,” Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite “ODSP 1, 2, & 3,” which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.

Ashley-Elizabeth Best's profile page

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.

“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