Glossary of Poetic Terms

Crip poetics is a school of poetry that resists an ableist tradition of body representation in favor of explicitly turning to lived disabled experiences. As defined by poet Jim Ferris, crip poetics "embodies a disability consciousness; it is informed by and contributes to disability culture."

Like the term queer in the LGBTQIA+ community, crip derives from activist reclamations of cripple, an ableist slur referring to physically disabled people that now often serves as an umbrella term for the disability community. To claim crip is to identify with a politicized community identity that refuses compulsory non-disability as a prerequisite for social and political inclusion. Crip poetics also challenges stigmatizing assumptions about disability as always requiring medical intervention or correction, rewriting cultural narratives of what the word normal means.