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Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collection

Drawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled transMad approach, investigating ways of knowing, loving, and living not legible to the normative eye. This collection challenges the architecture of institutional psychiatry and its popular “wellness” analogues, offering instead a counternarrative of forced institutionalization, disorderly embodiment, and transMad self-determination.

At once jarring and joyful, Differential Diagnosis interrogates psychiatric power and locates capacities for disabled and/or transMad resistance in the oblique, the speculative, and the “nonsensical.” Cavar’s inventive full-length debut defamiliarizes cis, sane, abled existence through linguistic play and speculative imagery, offering Madness not only as poetic content, but also as craft technique and, ultimately, as a new way of being in the normative world.

A new, expansive collection by one of the most provocative and inventive poets of our time. 

In Dodging, Charles Bernstein pushes his poetics toward new kinds of formal and tonal attentions. This multifaceted work brings together comic velocity, pointed political critique, and passages of lyric intensity. Bernstein calls these poems “too late”: written late in life as irreversibility presses against reflection, regret, and renewed resistance—a situation in which dodging is not evasion but survival, a way of moving through political catastrophe and personal loss without being silenced by either.

The collection unfolds in three interrelated “fits”—a term suggesting bursts of composition, rhythmic surges, and formal groupings—titled “Dodging,” “Struggle,” and “Reflection.” These sections move from a series of flashes and fragments, then to assembled riffs and collaborations with poet Tracie Morris, and finally turn to refractions and aphorisms that embrace active contradiction. Together they trace a shifting field of contrasts: between satire and elegy, volatility and concentration, comedy and grief.

Both fundamentally true to Bernstein’s voice and radically radiant in its range, Dodging is a work that moves restlessly across forms and tones—by turns sly, searching, and unguarded, where humor and grief occupy the same ground.