Glitchhood and Identity—Book Review: DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR
by mk zariel
“it’s okay, you can move freely now,” the narrative voice assures you as you wander into the expanse of the void. Glittering with what the author terms “disasterfire,” malleable and softly communal, the synaesthetic nature of it is all-consuming: “a blank moist texture when you reach out. it’s viscous like jam, it gives like muscle. it’s okay to intertiapunch the air in front of you.” The text blurs together, full of unconventional spelling and spacing cdestroying the boundaries of sentences, thoughts, identities. In this metaphorical space, anything goes, even the physically impossible.
Released in December 2024 on Kith Books, tommy wyatt blake’s new book DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR is a collection of experimental prose poetry and hybrid work exploring the themes of dissociation, functional multiplicity (most commonly associated with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but in actuality a much broader label), and the fluxuating spaces of the neurodivergent mind. blake, a neurodivergent and disabled poet, has authored twenty other books–some self-published, and many in collaboration with fifth wheel press, Bottlecap Press, Querencia Press, Gutslut Press, and other indie publishing organizations. This text finds them exploring their own experiences of plurality, a reality that Kith Books described on Instagram as “a mind where all lives live concurrent, informing the now.” As far as DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR is concerned, linearity is irrelevant, the only meaning lying in the intentionally glitched and divergent.
The first poem in blake’s chapbook begins with the nearly universal COVID-era experience of debilitating technical difficulties–“wen i touch / technology it breaks my fingers with bright light nd / viruses” –quickly pivoting to an extended metaphor about the experience of trauma, combining cyberpunk imagery and body horror to share a chilling yet universal vignette. Blake goes on to describe his desire to share intimacy and vulnerability, describing his lover as “shattered” yet longing to be cared for by them. In “many mirrored moons” he delves into the experience of synaesthesia, showing how “red is / cherry and cherry is dying on a raindisastered monday,” how one’s senses can be overwhelmed and merge into surreal and conceptual imagery. He describes those experiencing multiplicity as “a glitch in water, buzzing” and headspace as an amorphous void. In “inside you there are two wolves” he details the process of coming to terms with one’s multiplicity, the 2 AM Google searches, the fear of ableism and fakeclaiming, the tenuous belonging–all the while bringing almost absurdist synaesthetic imagery into his work, bringing the reader into an utterly nonlinear ribbon of time.
This book not only offers readers a glimpse of the entropy and boundlessness that defines neurodivergence, but finds its foundations in the queerness of glitchhood. Traditional lineated poetry makes no appearances, nor do line breaks most of the time–every poem is one all-lowercase paragraph, words blurring together, sometimes forgoing punctuation. Even the spacing between words is questioned (as in the title) and nonstandard spellings are frequent. Thus, similar to contemporary queer (anti)futurist works such as Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto and the popular queer blog VoidGoddess.org, the majority of DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR aims to glitch the very construct of language. Imperfection, typographic errors, and subversions of poetic form are elevated to a work of surreal art, making clear that it is not just the mind that exists outside of order and structure, but perception itself.
In DISASTERSTAR, the second half of the collection, the words are flipped upside down, forcing the reader to turn the book over if they have a physical copy–a design choice that, like the poems themselves, challenges assumption and structure. Focusing on embodiment, blake wastes no time in bringing the imagery of intense negation and dissolution to the forefront, representing line breaks with an // but formatting the poems as one paragraph: “the body is disasterfucked // splayed on streets slicked // back with rain needling // through, sewing the body // closed until the sky spews // out wisps called wishes.” The body is then described as a means to an end, a void, a “true neutral amethyst”–rather than taking the form of personhood, it is portrayed as a dynamic object meant to be destroyed and remade. Drawing on the otherkin community’s embrace of the animalistic and voidpunk’s culture’s politicization of nonhuman identity, Blake describes a longing to “feel a little humananimal for once,” focusing not just on negation but on the desire to live in an utterly alienated and queer bodymind.
Rather than focusing on plurality as DISASTERFIRE did, DISASTERSTAR is an anthem for queer bodies, but perhaps more precisely for alienation–for the desire to be glitched, destroyed, reinvented. Both sections of DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR, however, do not only expand the definition of minds and bodies but of identity itself. Celebrating the dissolution and fragmented nature of identity, blake creates a world in which bounded selves are unnecessary, instead embracing an ethic of anarchic universal love and generative overwhelm, or as he put it in DISASTERFIRE–“you lose if you truly believe you exist.”
DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR
Tommy Wyatt Blake
Publisher: Kith Books
24 pp. Pub.: December 2024
mk zariel {it/its} is a transmasculine poet, theater artist, movement journalist, & insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at https://linktr.ee/mkzariel, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.
