Bad Weather Mammals is a poetry collection by Ashley-Elizabeth Best.
“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. (From ECW Press)
Ashley-Elizabeth Best is a disabled poet and essayist from Kingston, Ont. Her debut collection of poetry, Slow States of Collapse, was published in 2016. Best’s chapbook Alignment was published in 2021. That same year, Best was also a contributor for Resistance, a collection of poems curated and edited by Sue Goyette.
Best was on the longlist for the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize for My Grief is a Violence.
