How to Access Art

Pasquale Toscano considers Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, “Hardly Creatures.”

By Pasquale ToscanoNovember 20, 2025

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

THIS PAST JULY, I quietly observed a 35th birthday. Not my own or a loved one’s but for something I’ve come to know intimately all the same: the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was this law that enabled my reentry to the public world after a spinal cord injury in 2013. (A pickup truck struck my bicycle, burst a vertebra, and temporarily paralyzed me below the waist.) Twelve years on, the ADA’s protections still grant me access to the spaces across which the thread of my life unspools. I mean everything from an apartment building with accessible parking to an office around the corner from an elevated commode. Even theaters are often latticed with elevators and corridors, sometimes reserving seats for folks who limp along with a brace and cane, like me.

At the same time, the ADA can only take me so far. This is not just because it was imperfect to begin with or because it’s getting pulverized by the present regime but also because certain cultural locations lie beyond its reach. Maybe not the theater itself, for example, but often the plays unfolding onstage. Hardly Creatures (2025), the debut volume by “disabled, bakla, Filipino American poet” Rob Macaisa Colgate, deftly spotlights why that’s the case in two such sites: the poetry collection and the museum gallery. Both can seem tissues of negative stereotypes about the mad, blind, or lame. Too often, they level us into ciphers or devices, a flattening energized by generic conventions in the West, as well as by critical comparisons of aesthetic defect to physical deformity. No wonder artists rarely broach disability in positive, unguarded, first-person terms. This caginess leads to another problem, a vacuum of models when aspiring disabled creatives look for encouragement. And on top of all of this, there are physical and mental barriers to appreciating, let alone creating, art: the stamina required, say, for attending to a book of poems or wending one’s way through an exhibit with nary a bench to be found.

What works have never been created because of such demands? This is the wraithlike question conjured up by Colgate’s verse. It looms, reproachfully, in “Empty Frame for the Artist Who Was Too Sick to Ever Finish the Work or Make It to the Gallery,” a devastating lyric of negative space, and haunts all of Hardly Creatures, which takes the form of a sequence of museum exhibits. The twist is that they’re rejiggered for the needs of othered bodyminds.

Granted, Colgate is not the first to champion such fiercely anti-ableist poetics. Just this year, Stephen Kuusisto’s Close Escapes did so with quietly erudite economy. But in the mostly overlooked disability literature movement, Colgate goes the furthest to expose the poetic resources of troubleshooting access, to show that art might include as much as it shuts out. In lines of dovetailed drama and humor, he hones the technical, legalistic language of accessibility and accommodation into a literary tool that renovates—as one might a stair-cramped Victorian mansion—both the lyric poem and the poetry collection itself.

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Immediately, Hardly Creatures sets to redefining what such a book can accomplish. Its table of contents not only blueprints this “gallery of our own” but also offers a vantage for reassessing spaces we think we know well. This view might be called crip, to use the reappropriation of “cripple” undertaken by some in the disability community, emphasizing lived realities over the need for a cure. To take one example, the “history of display” in the natural history gallery (explored in the book’s fourth section, “Ecologies”) primes us to learn about how physically aberrant bodies—often gendered and racialized too—have long been exploited for the fun and education of able spectators. Less bleak, the last section, titled “Exit: Gift Shop and Vestibule,” promises us the best souvenir of all: tips for “how to survive.” (Never fear: that poem’s enumerated enjambment means it’s anything but Instapoetic.)

At the start of the collection, the “Access Legend” comprises a five-by-three grid of familiar icons—from “Access Support Worker” to “Low-Vision Guided Tour”—and combinations of these symbols accompany many of the poems. The use of these icons might seem a performative gimmick (it did to me at first), but in fact they serve as an index of interpretive possibility. Collectively, they reimagine the lyric “I” less as a solipsistic, apostrophizing presence than as a collaborator in care, someone poised to help us maneuver this collection-cum-museum together.

This is all to say that Colgate takes his central spatial metaphor as seriously as any poet has since George Herbert in The Temple (1633), in which he ushers the reader from the church porch to the sanctuary and out the other side while tracing the spiritual conflicts that pass between human and divine. The comparison might seem pedantic, but it signals something important about Colgate’s volume: its broadly metaphysical technique, and the company it keeps. Metaphysical, in this case, refers to the 17th-century school of verse that, since the early 1900s, has stood for great lyric poetry. It’s verbally witty and structurally well wrought. But it’s most famous for mind-boggling conceits, which at their best can jar us with the shock of revelation. This is true especially in the lines of the sensually cerebral John Donne and erotically devotional Herbert.

Colgate is their worthy 21st-century heir. Ending a collection in a gift shop is no zanier, after all, than likening a flea to a marriage bed, as Donne mischievously does. Colgate even begins, like Herbert in “The Church-porch,” with “Entryway,” the first section, which contains only one poem, “We Do Not Enter the Gallery.” This gallery is designed for normative bodyminds, and wisely, Colgate approaches the problem of how such venues render culture inaccessible at an oblique angle. With astute understatement, he adduces the reasons disabled folks often avoid these sites to begin with: “Heather does not fail to find instructions on touching the art. // Alex does not notice the digital tour is only available for certain artworks.” Colgate’s ironized acceptance impels us to conceive of the need for this book. We grasp it more urgently still as the poem accumulates affective intensity. “Leaving early, I do not begin to wonder what it might look like / if my friends and I built a gallery of our own. / I do not begin to wonder what it would feel like to belong,” the poet’s persona disquietingly explains.

Colgate’s focus on crip community throughout the volume lands more than one emotional gut punch. These intensify into wallops as we realize that a major problem with cultural exclusion is that it deprives crips of places for forming community. This is where things get tricky: as much as we might admire the metaphysicals, Colgate coaxes us into recognizing that they’re part of the larger issue. True, these poets often mention disabling sickness. (For my money, Donne’s 1624 work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is among the greatest autobiographical treatises on ill-health of all time.) But disability, in their verse, is rarely anything like a resource to be conserved, to borrow from the bioethicist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. At best, it forces one back to God; at worst, it undermines one’s faith to the point of despair. Either way, it’s tinted by ableist shading that recent disability scholars have worked to efface.

This work has obviously influenced Colgate, who studied disability theory at the University of Texas at Austin and even quotes Garland-Thomson in an epigraph. The ethical charge of his training, however, moves him not to forsake his metaphysical forebears but to deploy their techniques like a crowbar that opens up the lyric tradition to crip knowledge. As a result, disabled folks—and their realities—filter in more boldly than ever before.

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As with Donne, who was castigated by Ben Jonson for playing with meter and “not keeping of accent,” Colgate’s formal innovations are key. In “We Do Not Enter the Gallery,” say, the reasons for avoiding this space become increasingly complicated—and the mind that conceives of them, increasingly disabled. Meanwhile, the lines snake in various lengths and rhythms, ever more unwieldily enjambed. Colgate might be learning, here, from Herbert in “The Collar,” with its similarly minded speaker, apparently restored to godly order by the end. Colgate’s poem, by contrast, concludes not with the resolution of rhyme but with the mounting madness (and anger and exhaustion) of being shut out—especially from spaces that should thrive on the creativity of all. “Leaving early” from the normatively designed gallery, he writes, “I do not / somehow make it to my apartment I do not / turn on the light I do not find a great emptiness waiting I do not / shut my eyes at the sight.”

The second section, “Access Guide,” clarifies what the book’s beginning has already flagged: Colgate aims to reverse this exclusion by putting those logos we encountered in the “Access Legend” to poetic work. In each new section, a table of contents is itself a poem. This one, marked with an “Access Support Worker” symbol, emphasizes that help awaits us “with / whatever way you have arrived to / need.” But we’re also invited to “skip this and head right into the gallery (page 19)” for lyrics less explicitly metapoetic, less explicitly informative about one’s movement through the book, if doing so feels best.

In the meantime, Colgate initiates us into the peculiarities of his creation—and to the community it strives to erect: “This is the space. Here is how we learn to belong in it.” We meander through many spaces over the next few pages. In “Sensory Room I,” “the light stays as dim as you would like. // I promise the light stays.” And in “Gender-Neutral Bathroom,” an “ode to pissing” explores urination as both an embodied necessity and a fantastically wacky metaphor. Pissing, for Colgate, signifies both poetic composition (“The song of piss on porcelain”) and the schizophasia that animates his verse (“babbling like piss around a drain that will not clear”). Generically, the decision to call this an ode is telling: urine itself can feel as wondrous and physically elusive as Pindar’s athletes, especially when you’re relearning to void your bladder after paralysis, as I did in 2013, or when you need to be lifted onto the toilet in the first place, as Colgate does for his friend Lorraine in a lyrically gritty sketch of “access intimacy.”

There is a reciprocal dynamic between the experiences of disability that Colgate evokes and his formal choices. One section, called “Medical Portraits,” for instance, features a sestina “Medicated on 800 mg of Antipsychotics” and an abecedarian “for the Care Shift I Failed to Show up For,” with language balanced deftly on the razor of colloquial vigor and poetic whimsy. The second lyric likewise points to why the collection is more than pretty political homily.

Colgate’s persona throughout is neither a straightforward victim nor a self-appointed visionary. Rather, his attempts at creating and contributing to “care webs”—in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s words—bring his peccadillos and paradoxes into stark relief. Some of the most poignant episodes in the book, in fact, are moments when he is, to riff on Roxane Gay, a relatably bad crip. Over “The Body Is Not an Apology Except for Mine Sometimes,” the icons for “Sensory Sensitivity” and “Relaxed Event” are crossed out. The speaker concedes, “There are people I want to remember and when they call / still I wonder: why.”

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Time and again, Colgate maps out the tiring expanse of maintaining disability pride. Sometimes, he desires to abandon it altogether. Faced with certain precarities, Colgate acknowledges—as I have felt—that “there is no conclusion / here, and I see my wounded friends, or I don’t, but I love them, and I do, // and all these rhythms soon will change.” Indeed, they do so on the page itself, ricocheting with the ethical questions at play in “A Case for Self-Harm.” This poem draws from the animal world, evocatively and economically, to suggest that suicide isn’t unnatural, per se (perhaps a nod here to Donne’s controversial Biathanatos). Yet the poem’s perfectly orchestrated conclusion adds a crucial qualification: to speak of, and thus destigmatize, thoughts of self-harm might also enable “swimming back into freshwater to spawn,” like salmon. These themes are also subtly, sensitively probed in “Maid,” about legalized “Medical Aid in Dying,” which many disability advocates, though by no means all, oppose.

Also inspiring the salmon in Colgate is his partner, Eli. He recurs throughout the book as a thematic lodestar of love, care, and creative access hacks. Some of the collection’s best lines are written to or about him. In one case, his response to Colgate’s verbal chaos when the latter’s a “bit schizo” is literally salvific: “While I listen” to Eli, Colgate concedes, “I decide I cannot die. Not yet. / He has so many songs to figure out.” But Eli’s presence is also significant because the entwinement of disability and sexuality of any kind—in particular disability and queerness—has long gone underrepresented.

Tropes of the undesiring, undesirable cripple run deep—from angelic Tiny Tim to Lady Chatterley’s impotent husband (hence, her need for a lover). For my part, I’ve been asked if my limp is permanent on a first date by a guy who seemed great on the phone. I’ve been blocked on Grindr for explaining my situation, after being told my pics were hot. And I’ve fielded questions about what could possibly be done if my blood flow was as faulty as my bowels.

As an antidote to these hang-ups, Colgate often shifts into a register as rapturously sensual as Donne at his best. He does so to champion activities ostensibly unsexy in the extreme. In a poem about ensuring Colgate takes his antipsychotics, Eli “undress[es] the pills from their bottles, svelte fingers placing them / onto his soft pink tongue, saliva welling, eye contact like a rocket taking off.” Colgate writes, “He crawls onto me / slowly, tilts my chin up with one careful thrust of his fingertips / and kisses me deeply.” Disability, then, might enhance, rather than suppress, one’s experience of pleasure. Insofar as many able-bodied folks take pills, crip smarts of this sort offer inroads to arousal that nearly everyone can enjoy.

Mentioning Eli, however, also raises one of my few cavils with the collection: the further it moves from the museum metaphor, the more Colgate’s three dimensions quiver. As a character, Eli is flat-out saintly in all he does, without an ounce of begrudgement. This hardly comports with my experiences, however hopeful I find his persevering ministrations. Tonally, the “Access Check-Ins” at the start of each section occasionally mist up into self-helpy haze (“To waste time / existing / is legitimately / this deep / need”). And more than once, Colgate’s ironized humor shimmies into glibness. Take the aforementioned “History of Display,” which valiantly tries to versify the entire lineage of disability, from prehistory to the present. Such a task means strategic misprision, but it needn’t levy offhand jabs about, say, “the biblical invention of body shame.” Never mind the actual Bible’s divided homily on physical weakness.

And yet, these are mild misgivings when one considers that this same poem provocatively folds the “first dated archaeological record of schizophasia” into the “first archaeological record of poetry.” The proof for this generative chiasmus, I’ve suggested, is in the stuff of Hardly Creatures itself. Colgate reveals that poetry can be more than just a sequence of lines on a page: it can be, in the last of his many crisply realized conceits, a bench for respite and care.

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I’ve been craving a cultural coup of such daring for a while now. Craving because, though I’ve found crip community in the literary past, almost always the interpretive work of locating it—of working my way in—has fallen squarely on me. The final gift of Colgate’s volume is to create a space where crips don’t have to bend beneath this onus any longer. A space where I can go at my own pace, in my large, lagging, limping physique.

On finishing Hardly Creatures, I felt a bit more than the creature I sometimes hardly seem to be. Hardly, in a world where accessibility can feel elusive. This is true even with the ADA, even with the examples of genuine care abounding in the natural world, as Colgate’s title poem relates. We humans, it suggests, are hardly creatures for failing to heed what’s all around us, every single day.

But the title—especially that adverb, hardly—resonates more broadly too. It speaks to the contingencies that shadow all people in bodies of flesh and bone with frequently meandering minds, contingencies that disability brings into especially sharp relief. These can be banal and quotidian: I barely made it to the bathroom before I shit my pants. Or I just made it to a second-floor classroom before the teacher shut the door. And they can be more existential too. That is, I hardly have a love life. Or I’ve closely escaped the lie that disability doesn’t have a culture at all. (This myth is one Andrew Leland contemplatively debunks in his memoir.) That so many of us become disabled from barely surviving an accident enhances the relevance of that hardly all the more.

Meanwhile, the notion of “hardly creatures” points ahead to a brighter future that’s possible thanks partly to works like Hardly Creatures. The broader the entrance for crip existence, knowledge, wisdom, grief, and joy, the more those gaps in the ADA will shrink—assuming it endures at all—and the more we’ll accept and desire bodyminds in all sorts of forms. The more we’ll seem hardly creatures at all: we’ll seem, instead, humans, lovers, and writers, charting the intimacies and innovations of audaciously accessible art.