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In this collection of essays, Raymond Luczak once again offers readers powerful and deeply personal reflections on his experiences as a Deaf gay man. He begins his journey with the printed word where lipreading is not required, and discovers a family of sorts through the writings of Walt Whitman and others; he ventures deeper into the queer community with thoughts on ageism, disability, and radical faeries. Luczak explores the many nuances within the Deaf community and the audist attitudes of hearing people, particularly in the media, and takes a detour into ASL gloss poetry. He speculates on what the Deaf community will look like a century from now and ends with a long bike ride that celebrates the ongoing questions of being a Deaf gay man.

In Far from Atlantis, Raymond Luczak makes use of traditional poetic forms to tell the stories of two vastly different worlds: the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which often looks like an island on the map, and the fabled island of Atlantis. The poems in this collection are rooted in the natural world, with the power of water as a means for escaping the cruelty and tedium of an ableist society. While recounting his troubled childhood as the only deaf person in a large hearing family, Luczak aligns himself with mythological, monstrous, and superhuman beings who, like him, exist on the margins. The narratives invoked and the worlds created in these poems are both autoethnographic and speculative, and include figures lost to history like Lucy Frances Fitzhigh Hooe and Frances Peterson, along with 1970s pop culture icons like the Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman.

What is the language of home?
This short story collection offers readers many possible answers that reveal the Deaf experience in all its complexities. Written over nearly forty years by celebrated Deaf author Raymond Luczak, this collection of thirty stories paints a vivid panorama of Deaf lives. From a young DeafBlind boy feeling lost within his hearing family to a hearing son of Deaf parents caught between their infighting and a hearing mother realizing in the split second of her own death the full impact of the missteps she has taken while raising her Deaf son, Luczak crafts narratives that resonate with authenticity. Other stories feature an ASL interpreter feeling conflicted about a Deaf neighbor and a Deaf woman who becomes blacklisted as a backstabber. These characters often navigate the murky waters of the hearing world, sometimes with a touch of ASL gloss. The Language of Home is an exciting literary contribution that offers rare, nuanced representations of Deaf characters.

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves
 
Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others.
 
In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

When Raymond Luczak was growing up deaf in a hearing Catholic family of nine children, his mother shared conflicting stories about having had a miscarriage after—or possibly around—the time he was conceived. As an elegy to his lost twin, this book asks: If he had a twin, just how different would his life have been?