Overview

In this groundbreaking collection of sign language gloss poetry, the first of its kind to be published, Raymond Luczak explores the dynamics of written English poetry and ASL gloss by communing with the animals living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Having lost much of his hearing at the age of nine months, Luczak was not allowed to use sign language until he was 14 years old, when he demanded to learn it. In the mining town of Ironwood, Michigan, Luczak felt isolated among his hearing peers at school and his family members at the dinner table. More at home in the woods, he discovered a place both wild and welcoming, with no need to guess at meaning through lipreading. Sensing a kinship with the array of animals there, he believed they understood him in ways the hearing world could not. Knowing Deaf people had historically and wrongly been outcast as languageless and wild, Luczak reclaims the woods as a source for his own natural language and sense of belonging. As a Deaf writer giving English poetry readings in American Sign Language (ASL), Luczak faced the challenge of performing his work in ASL, so he developed his own system of notating ASL gloss on the page. It is this deeply personal, interior language that Luczak uses to animate this moving collection, making his poems legible -- knowable, accessible -- across communities too often separated by a lack of knowledge.

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Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over 30 books, including the poetry collections Chlorophyll, Lunafly, and Far from Atlantis; once upon a twin was selected as a Top Ten U.P. Notable Book of the Year for 2021. His prose titles include A Quiet Foghorn: More Notes from a Deaf Gay Life and the award-winning Deaf gay novel Men with Their Hands. His most recent anthologies as editor are Yooper Poetry: On Experiencing Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Oh Yeah: A Bear Poetry Anthology. A proud Yooper native and an inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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