Cling Film

Description

“Cling Film is a collection that lifts many veils and lets in much-needed light and air…” – Carol Rumens, Guardian 

“…deliciously rendered with vulnerability and rage, yanking us straight to the facts so that we cannot fail ‘to take[her] seriously’” – Poetry Wales magazine

“With these crafted, unflinching poems, deftly calibrated between rage, humour, pain and joy, Bethany Handley opens our eyes and minds to new ways of seeing and being. A bold, urgent and gifted new voice in Welsh poetry.” – Owen Sheers author of Skirrid Hill

Bethany Handley’s debut pamphlet, Cling Film, explores existing as a young Disabled woman within a crossfire of ableism. An opening line of the title poem reads: ‘Ableism. The act of wrapping the world in cling film.’ Here is the crux of the poems, as they document how inaccessible and exclusionary design exclude many Disabled people. The collection lays bare the barriers that disable people from physical inaccessibility to the discrimination of others, such as incompetent doctors, ignorant passers-by or in dehumanising interviews for Universal Credit.

Set in familiar Welsh places – from the Heath Hospital in Cardiff to Mynydd Mawr, Handley asks the reader to travel in her skin in these witty and profound poems. Joy is found in nature, including a wheelchair user leaving proud tyre marks across the beach in ‘Hiya Butt Bay’. Ultimately, these formally inventive poems challenge myths about disability in ways that are striking, astute, and devastatingly exact.