Some time ago, for another publication, I was asked to review transgender poet Eli Clare's latest book for publication, which was presented to me as a great testament to my skill as a book reviewer, even though, to be honest, I've never had much of a head for poetry. But, as little magazines often do in these tough economic times, especially, the magazine changed editors and changed directions, and everyone sort of forgot about The Marrow's Telling

Sometimes my intellectual vanity was disappointed by that. Because I had never really gotten over that smart-little-girl thrill of knowing something nobody expects me to know, and getting my gold stars for it(Thanks to the world's chronically low expectations of disabled women, that was a sustaining thrill into my twenties.)

I was secretly relieved, however. The book made me uncomfortable, really. First, because it seemed that it would not even decide upon a form, but instead be both poetry book and memoir. The author made a lot of references to sexual abuse, some of it beginning, according to the poems, when Clare was only two years old.

Although many books about the disability experience are hardly frothy beach reading, very few were as in-your-face about violence, gender, and social class as this one.

I couldn't place Eli Clare at all. It shocked me that this bothered me, as a fairly young internet citizen of the world, convinced that she'd met someone who'd done everything, at least once. Even still, there were poems with loved ones who were both "He" and "She" and there was a very old-fashioned part of me thinking "For God's sake, Clare. Pick a side."(I don't think you could really do that, and anyway I admire those people who swear they love "the person, not the gender,") But there is a part of me, nurtured on television and Hostess cakes that wants things to be very binary: Men:Women: Gay: Straight.

And somehow, I wanted to believe that disabled people's confusion about our bodies rested in a different place than that one. But every few months or so, I returned to this book and the way it found beauty and freedom in ordinary things, like neckties. Read this book and make yourself uncomfortable; you'll be glad you did.

And I'm glad that I finally wrote about this experience, though I should have timed it for Pride, which was last week.

Erika J.