Poems that interrogate the complexities of disability, based on the author's evaluation of her own medical records

A Fate Worse Than Death is a stunning poetic investigation of the worthiness of disabled life as told through the author's evaluation of her own medical records over the course of a decade. Living with treatment-resistant diabetes, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and complex chronic pain, Nisha Patel reveals how her multiple disabilities intertwine with her day-to-day life, even when care and treatments are not available. As she works through bouts of illness, neglect, and care, Patel reveals how poetry provides her a way to resist the sway of medical hegemony and instead offer complex accounts of pain, sickness, and anger, but also love.

Navigating the menial and capitalist systems of health care and paperwork, documentation, and forms, Patel uses clinical texts in visual poems that show how words like patient and client underscore medical access and denial of coverage more than words like person and care. Patel asks us to consider if her life is worth living - and saving. The future of her disabled body and her desire for it is a building meditation as the collection progresses, ending not so much with a finite ending of cured illness and disease than with a look at how we can embody hope and joy in a disabled body, as it is the body that, like time, goes on.

Nisha Patel is a queer spoken word poet & artist. She is the City of Edmonton’s 8th Poet Laureate and the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion. She is a prominent organizer and community builder, having worked with festivals across Canada, participating in both the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and the Canadian Individual Slam Championship. Her chapbooks, Limited Success, Water, Edmonton Girl, and I See You have reached audiences around the world with their discussions of family and grief, racism, and feminism. Over the years, Nisha has led many workshops and performed from small town Moose Jaw to metropolitan Seoul, South Korea over the course of four national and international tours. With nearly 200 performances to date, Nisha is committed to furthering her goals of reaching audiences that need it and the pursuit of excellence in spoken word. To that end, she has self-started community-focused residencies and mentored poets from multiple disciplines, curated showcases, taught performance and writing, and worked within new genres. She interviews poets on her side blog, Chai Latte, where she seeks to illuminate emerging BIPOC voices. In 2019, she founded a national queer femme South Asian artist collective, Maza Arts, and founded Moon Jelly House, a publishing house centering the work of marginalized poets.

Nisha Patel's profile page

A Fate Worse Than Death is polyvocal by necessity: to be disabled, Patel reminds us, is to be riven. Riven by medicine, riven by ableism, riven by sexism, riven by racism, riven by access friction, riven by our shifting identities coexisting in tension. Patel crips unexpected forms, from case notes to Wikipedia entries to patient handouts to medical imaging, to reveal how "the disabled body is the most possible." -Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of Paring and Vagaries

A Fate Worse Than Death is precise, dynamic, courageous, and careful. Confronting self- and medical examinations of disability, these poems show that a "fate" caused by repeat disappointments, inaccessibility, and costs leaves Patel no choice but to invent new terms of advocacy in order to document a glaring sense of agency and visibility. A certain voice, refusing to be erased, blooms in spite of the barriers and constraints both within the medical system and on the page. -Britta Badour, author of Wires That Sputter

A Fate Worse Than Death is a stunning achievement - rarely have I encountered a book so compelling and vulnerable. Nisha Patel's poetry burns with a fire that genuinely makes space in the world where we can exist and survive. Everyone needs to read this book. -Jordan Abel, author of Injun and NISHGA