A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors - earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy.
Acknowledgments xi A Cluster of Practices: An Introduction xv Access Practices xix Prelude 1 I. Tremors 17 II. Survivals and Sorrows 33 III. Moving Toward Porousness 61 IV. Dreams and Rebellions 81 V. Kin 105 Notes 127 Bibliography 149 Index 159
Poet, essayist, activist, and community-based social justice educator, Eli Clare is the author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, both published by Duke University Press, and The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion.
“Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming by Eli Clare is a balm, an invitation, a provocation. Time travel with these poems, essays, and access notes and soak in the disabled wisdom. Unfurl will open your spirit.” - Alice Wong, editor of Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire
“In Unfurl, Eli Clare offers a practice of survival rooted in interdependence and collective care. Confronting the ruptures of colonialism, diagnosis, categorization, and abuse, Clare offers the space for self to return to self. Here access creates intimacy, in ‘a river of stutter,’ ‘a feather bed of tremors,’ and an ode to moss, mushrooms, lichen, rocks, and leaves. Yes, this is a book about learning how to dream.” - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art
“Eli Clare’s Unfurl moves in many directions, an intricate whirl, a spiraling dance across time and place toward radical, open-ended crip trans/queer abolitionist and anticolonial world making. Both balm and toolkit, these poems, stories, and dreamings do urgent work, sharing histories, memories, and practices of care and action against our racial-imperialist, genocidal, ecocidal present. They gather and honour communities, build our capacities for resistance, and refuse the violent coercions of power.” - Trish Salah, author of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1
