Poetry is always a hit or a miss for me, but when I saw that this book of poems not only had queer and disabled representation but also incorporated fantasy, I was sold! I absolutely loved how the author portrayed the fantastical elements and used the genre to tell a story that is not easy to tell. Their portrayal of chronic illness and disability was moving. I cried at many different points, and the poems made me feel seen. I will definitely be checking out more of this author’s work in the future!

Ennis Rook Bashe is a nonbinary graduate student from New York who loves their rescue cat, making cosplay TikToks, and watching horror game streamers. They write books about queer & disabled people surviving and recovering from trauma, finding community, living their best lives… and falling in love. Their newest book of poetry is Beautiful Malady. Though short, this collection is a powerful exploration of what it means to be disabled in a world that is not willing to accommodate or undersand, written from a place of honest authenticity that will capture the attention of any reader.
There is a lot in this book that deals with disability through speculative terms. Bashe addresses the issues with being disabled, with having a body that is often at odds with the world’s expectations and the laws of physics, in a way both haunting and speculative. Take, for example, the poem “on having had wings,” in which Bashe uses the image of flight and having wings to one of freedom from the heaviness of the earth:
I don’t like this human thing of yours; wingless,
groundbound, foot after foot. Do you like hauling
your whole solid self everywhere? Do you like
the clomp of staircases, the creak of knees.
The speaker here is burdened by the ability to be human, which is a fascinating take on disability, especially when presented to a non-disabled audience. The idea of making a normal body the faulty thing, and to wish for a less normal body, one that is “made of thoughts and glass and light,” puts disability into a perspective that will both build empathy in the reader, but also make them feel guilty for being unaware of just how privileged being able-bodied is. Poems like this will make readers uncomfortable, as well they should.
However, this is not a one-note collection. Bashe also uses speculative tropes to condemn the disability itself. For example, in “mad, without scientist,” the disability is seen as a curse to be coddled by society, but also feared:
Archetypes are invariable, nothing like dice:
you must have two hands to cradle someone else.
No mad without scientist. No scars without sneers.
Here, Bashe explores how disabilities are seen by society, and how those who are disable are both cursed and blessed by society. “Churn out enough/numbers to become a priority and thus deserve flesh.” The idea that those who are disabled only have value to society if they can produce something—math, science, etc.—and that their disabilities are glossed over so long as they are of use should unsettle readers. However, Bashe does not blame, merely present the information.
The fact that speculative tropes were used to promote this message is especially appealing. In a world where the disabled community has to learn how to navigate not just physical systems, but also legal and medical systems designed to ignore them and not take them seriously, the idea of a character or script takes on a new idea. If part of the disability is being forced to put on a mask to make others comfortable, then is the disability really accommodated? If the able-bodied heroes of the tales can have their medals and honors, why not the disabled? Poems like “this universe and all others” work to asking those questions through the lens of alternate realities and the myths contained therein:
Goddess of cryogenics and cave silt,
of wheelchairs on spider legs,
of clockwork hearts, sword canes in ballrooms
and bionic eyes on the spaceship bridge…
This poem is one of defiance and triumph, and ends with the prayer:
Le us, in any universe,
refuse to be erased.

Ennis Rook Bashe has provided a glimpse into the world of living life as a person with disabilities. They use speculative tropes, from horror to fantasy to RPG gaming, to address the issues of dealing with a disabled body. They also condemn the disability and society’s reactions to it. They also use this book and their poetry to declare that they and their communities have purpose and value, and there is almost a fierce declaration of refusal to submit or be erased. This is a powerful collection, and it will unsettle readers, calling attention to their own privileges and perceptions. The fact that it does so through a lens of speculation, including horror and dark fantasy, to drive these themes forward is impressive, and any fan of speculative poetry needs to read Beautiful Malady.

"I am utterly in love with Death."
As a suicidal queer person with invisible disability I think this book was perfect. It's not just for me or someone who could relate to the struggles, but for everyone, it's short and beautiful, heartbreaking and even hopeful.
I didn't expect anything and I got everything.
I love the art details on the cover and would love to have this masterpiece on my bookshelf.

Beautiful Malady is a collection of speculative poetry, dealing with queerness and disability and the modern and speculative treatment of those who suffer from disability. The collection is short but powerful and contains a number of self-contained but related poems as well as a series of 8 poems which actually tells a complete short story in poetic form.

This'll be a short review, as you'd expect from something this short in page length, and I should note here quickly that I'm not a huge fan of or really a good judge of poetry. So take my words here with a grain of salt. But Beautiful Malady worked for me pretty well, really hitting home the struggles of the disabled to be taken seriously when they say their bodies are in pain, to not be laughed at when they suffer or seek treatment, and to not be treated as lesser when they try to simply live their lives like anyone else with what accomodations they require. Disabled people are people, and not in any way lesser, and the disabled perhaps (as noted in a at least one poem) are better able to recognize when they should rely on accomodations like a cane than the prideful healthy-bodied who should use one when they get old and less able.

Bashe uses speculative ideas and concepts (Fae and Changlings, Princes and Ghost Bodyguards, etc.) to illustrate these themes really well, and does include in the end a strong autobiographical piece on their own struggle and their struggle to write about it. And the aforementioned 8 part story of poems, Rose Ghost, is really great as it showcases a girl whose disability makes her body barely able to function, so she's given the ability to become a ghost who can serve as a bodyguard for the royal prince, with whom she falls in love. A really excellent way to begin and end this collection, as its first and eighth parts bookend the poems. So yeah, despite me not being a poetry guy, I recommend this one.

Haunting, visceral, inclusive, trauma and persecutio. Dark and exciting. Prose was top notch. Devoured every page. Thank you Net Galley for ARC in exchange for my honest opinion

This poetry book was raw, emotional, and had hard-hitting and descriptive writing. I thought the way the author intertwined the beauty and also the struggles of chronic illnesses and disabilities with fairytales and myth, was impactful and eye-opening.

I was so excited about this collection of poetry because of the content and, to be honest, the cover. As someone with a chronic invisible disability, I was looking forward to feeling a connection through the words. I didn't end up enjoying this collection unfortunately.

Beautiful Malady is a poetry collection by Ennis Rook Bashe that cast a gray light and some fantasy vibes on the darker side of reality.

Darker in the sense that the world chooses to keep it in the shadow rather than acknowledge it.

Bashe's words harken SLAM poetry for me. The emotion is clear in the tone of the writing and the stories weave themselves together across the collection to leave the reader with a sense of feeling seen.

I absolutely loved these poems. They are exactly up my alley, the intersection of disability and spec fic/poetry. Bashe has a beautiful sense of flow and evokes really poignant themes with their imagery and stories. This is one I’ll revisit over and over, I’m sure.

Thank you to Interstellar Press and NetGalley for an arc of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Ennis Rook Bashe celebrates life and experience in a poetic collection well worth reading and savoring. Wonderful work to explore for readers of verse.

A haunting speculative poetry collection that explores queerness, disability and mental health through the author's fantastical "aliases." From the gorgeous cover to the stunning verse to the heartfelt themes of death, trauma and chronic illness, this proves to be an excellent collection of poetry. My favorite poems from this work include "rose ghost iii," "i, magus," and "death is a lesbian and she can pick me up" <3

Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced reader copy.

This book was very moving and impactful as it deals with a journey of healing mental illness and disability through creating a fantasy world in the mind. The prose was beautiful and really made me immerse myself in this fairytale like world that the author has created to build acceptance. I feel like this novel can really help deal with depression and healing with a coping mechanism.

As Ennis mentions in the author’s note, medical trauma is real, and some bodies are treated differently. You are supposed to recover or die, to be an angel or a source of hope, possibly because regardkess those who treat us should honestly be locked up (my mother calls me into the living room every time there’s a disabled performer on reality television)

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve seen all the posts from young men and women becoming doctors or doing house jobs, and sometimes the callousness astounds us. It makes you sit there and know that you should focus on your health because being at their mercy would be something else.

And when it comes to mental health, that’s its own unregulated ball game.

But what do you do when your illness or disability means that you’ll constantly be at the receiving end of the worst? That is what Ennis writes about in this book. But it’s also a conversation about the body and what you feel when it feels like when the thing we’re meant to exist in, doesn’t seem to want to exist for us. What sheer will can stand for and what love can and cannot make us feel.

I’m not a good poetry reviewer, even though I read a lot of it; but Beautiful Malady is one of the best anthologies I’ve read this year and deserves to be checked out! You can tell that this is not the authors first rodeo; Ennis has published other works of fiction and poetry, and this reflects that experience. It’s a well put together collection that has a theme that it sticks to instead of being all over the place.

A beautifully written collection of poems with the themes of disability, chronic illness, trauma and queerness running throughout.

I dont't generally read much poetry but as a chronically ill person myself who has had numerous doctors and other people not believe me about my conditions I really resonated with this Bashes's work.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

A short poetry collection that centers on disability and chronic pain, but beware if this cold trigger you. The writing style wasn't for me, but I did appreciate the DnD references. I also think the queerness aspect is not *that* present, considering where it was presented in the synopsis - if you go in looking for that, I think you will be dissapointed.
Overall, good for people that like some of the newer poetry styles (like Amanda Lovelace), and looking for themes of disability and chronic pain/illness.

Beautiful Malady by Ennis Rook Bashe is a queer journey through corporeal suffering and defiant joy. A collection of lyrical imagination, Bashe takes us on a journey through medical trauma to sexual pleasure that includes magic, robots, and necromancy. It is both well balanced in terms of language and musicality, and themes of saccharine melancholy. I would love nothing more but to scream it from mountain tops. As a chronically ill person myself, I too would call out to and worship the “goddess of cryogenics… gemstone dragon’s-hoard glass eyes… [and] cyborgs.” Bashe describes this collection as a “book of alibis,” where they can explore things that are not them, or an extension of them, or them at their extremes, and I adore the imagery of nightmarish hospitals, alchemy, and wingless angels. Despite it all, Bashe teaches us about a crippled body that deserves to live.

When Beautiful Malady by Ennis Rook Bashe popped up in my Twitter feed with that gorgeously maximalist cover, I knew I had to have it. I’ve been on a bit of a poetry kick lately, mainly focusing on works by queer and/or disabled poets, and this little gem had the added wonder of being spun together with speculative elements, itching at my extremely nerdy needs. So I took myself over to Netgalley and did the whole sign up thing to get myself an ARC. And, after having read only a handful of poems from the collection, I added Beautiful Malady straight onto to all of my wishlists (gifts marked for myself and others). I knew then that this was a book that I would very much need a physical copy of to fawn over, and that I would also want to talk endlessly about with other humans.
Beautiful Malady is a striking in depth look into what it is to be disabled; to live in a body that doesn’t always want to live with you. It sculpts very real moments of both difficulty and joy with brilliant flashes of fantasy that will leave you breathless with feeling.

In short, it’s the type of poetry I some day hope to write myself.

Bashe’s weaving of speculative elements with the reality of disability is seriously that good. I’m sure a lot of reviewers will talk about the robots or the ghosts (in fact, I probably will later, too), but my personal favourite example of Bashe’s masterful use of the speculative genre was the echoes of Frankenstein and witchcraft spun into ‘Mad, Without Scientist’:

I mean if they think you’re a curse.
If you have to scrawl on the walls in blood
at least write equations.
That comparison of disability with a magical blood curse conjures up those moments of living with disability where you feel like a burden, but with a dash of knowing, cruel wit in the follow up nod to the notion that the only thing disabled people are allowed to do with their disability is be inspiring. It mocks that uneasy pressure that we live with to turn our ‘misfortune’ into something constructive, rather than acknowledge that it’s not easy, that there are things we cannot do, or should not be expected to do. The meshing of genre elements with the real is impeccable.

And I think that trail of perfection stems, in part, from Bashe’s skill at making a simple image hit deeply. They manage to make the fantastical relatable by giving surreal scenarios and creatures simple language, and in turn make the real feel absurd. In ‘On Having Had Wings’, in which a once winged being complains of being wingless you get this gem:

[…] Do
you like hauling
your whole solid self everywhere?”
When I tell you that, as a disabled person, I felt that question in my heavy-ass bones. It’s so simple, gently disrupting our perception of reality for the briefest of moments by questioning a thing we do every day. But it lifts you off the ground and then sends you crashing back down in an instant. I’m a little obsessed, in case you can’t tell.

I also loved how this collection managed to avoid the usual pitfall of being one note. There’s darkness and gloom in Beautiful Malady, but also hope and humour and sweetness. And now I will talk about the robots because how freaking cute is, “Every giant robot would adore/ the ones who use machines to live.” (‘Alternate Mode: Mobility Aid’)? It conjures up feelings of nostalgia and comfort, and I’m not going to lie, all I can picture is the Iron Giant reaching down a finger to cuddle.

I could go on and on and on about Beautiful Malady. I could talk about having my own golden-eyed ‘Pain Son’ and how I too want to kiss myself on the head and go soaring (‘Rose Ghost II’), but instead, I’m just going to drop the link to buy the collection here, and wish you all a happy Queer Pride, and a Happy Disability Pride too ❤

I don't typically sit and read poetry, but I couldn't help but want to give Beautiful Malady a chance. As a queer, disabled person I found great comfort in many of these short poems. I felt seen, I felt heard, I sat in the sadness and anger felt by many, but also revelled in the strength and beauty there is to find in the community. My personal favourite was 'pain son', which had me laughing over our shared love for the furry gremlins we cat parents have, be they 4, 3 or even 2 legged companions.
I definitely recommend giving Beautiful Malady a go, regardless of if you enjoy poetry or not. The only issue I had was that the kindle edition didn't seem very well formatted, making it difficult to read at times.

The poems collected here are interesting and compelling, and are sure to raise some controversy in the disability community, especially because author Bashe struggles with loathing her chronically ill body and trying to find a way to live with it with pride and care. Her demonification of her illness and body is at times understandable but more often problematic: her combative, disparaging sorties to her own organs and systems is potentially very triggering for readers who are chronically ill or disabled, and runs contrary to the anti-eugenicist advocacy practiced by many in the disabled community. While Bashe's writing is imaginative and original and clearly passionate, I can only recommend this with extreme caution.

At first I wasn't sure how I felt about this collection. The form felt off and it felt a bit messy. But once I got more into it I was truly blown away by the emotion and creativity in these poems. The imagery was so powerful. They felt desperate and hopeless but also beautiful, romantic and optimistic at times. I haven't read poetry like it.

Bashe merges fantasy and sci-fi with hard-hitting realities of life being chronically ill/disabled. As someone who has had hospital admissions and knows what it feels like to feel like you're dealing with something nobody else understands, these poems really spoke to me.

I really wish that everyone who loves poetry will find these poems and be as moved as I was.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC!