Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collectionDrawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic t
Hi everyone, it's new book o'clock!!
My debut poetry collection, Differential Diagnosis, is coming out in March 2026 with Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, and I want you all to know about it –– especially if you've enjoyed my posts about Madness, transMadness, anti-psych, etc. You can read some of the poems from the collection here and here and here. And, of course, you can preorder (!!!!!) at the above link!
Here's the cute little blurb:
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.
And some very generous praise:
“TransMad automythology, diagnostic of refusal, animal / bodymind of hunger & grief & play—Differential Diagnosis asks why peer precisely at what can’t be measured. Whether internal organ or fridge door, Cavar is gracious, opens and langues what’s inside: a whole of holes, the riddled disease, all that can be / is, and lives.”—Crystal Odelle, author of Trans Studies “Reveling in poetry’s tendency toward ‘bloat’ and excess and not-yet-normalized syntax, this propulsive debut collection showcases and delights in the poet’s mad wit. Through Cavar’s serious humor and playful theorizing and clever attempts to ‘outwit’ Gender, psychopower, and ‘commonsense,’ Differential Diagnosis offers all of us who sense that we were “born in the wrong episteme” strategies for making and making ‘where the nameless live.’” —Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of An Optimism
You can preorder it at the link above and add it to your Goodreads and Storygraph TBRs. Those interested in reviewing/interviewing can PM me or toss me an email here. After seeing your love and enthusiasm for Failure to Comply, I'm so excited to share this latest insane person book with all of you <3
