Books

impact statement (Brick Books, 2024)

Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan’s impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and “money models of madness,” and “wellness” checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto—and how the “wrong” kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite—care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit—imagining, and re-imagining, and re-imagining again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.

Praise for impact statement:

“Jody Chan’s brilliant and meticulous poems redefine care while situating and amplifying necessary stories, in chorus, at the heart of ‘a public-private continuum’ of confinement. From content statement to index and beyond, this dazzling book, thriven in the aftermath of ‘organized abandonment,’ blooms revolution and possibility. This poetry is reaching for you.” —Cecily Nicholson, author of Harrowings and Wayside Sang

“What a maestrapiece of disabled Mad queer Asian longing and making Jody Chan has written with impact statement. In this time of death and constant attack on our lives and dreams, Chan’s work is the courageous alternative future present we need. The disabled longing for things as vital and ordinary as chosen family driving without ID or arrest, flower markets blooming on the graves of former institutions, our lives. Damn, this book. Wow. Is this part of the next wave of disability justice, Mad writing? Yes. This book breaks code.”
—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of The Future is Disabled and Bodymap

sick

Winner - 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry

Finalist - 2020 Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Poetry

Winner - 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award

“Jody Chan writes, ‘have you ever found your specific wounds curled up in a song / written by someone else?’ sick is medicine and music. This book unearths a tenderness unknown to me before reading these poems and witnessing their ‘humble magic.’ Chan’s lyric is a landscape I return to find myself. How lucky are we to be living and reading while Jody Chan is writing and teaching us how to be ‘warm & unafraid’ — what a tremendous, marvelous gift.” —Yujane Chen

“This striking debut—poems of history, of beauty, of violence, of grief—will surprise you at every turn of phrase and page. Chan’s work is innovative, their treatment of the universal human condition meticulously unique. Do not miss this collection.” —Erica Dawson

“In sick, Jody Chan examines loss through brilliant and stunning lyric, each poem urgent with gentle ferocity. So much exists here in the absence of what is said, so much feels vestigial – a phantom limb that keeps aching through deftly crafted nuance, simply mesmerizing. The many exigencies of grief appear and reappear in this collection like a ‘hungry ghost’, but Chan proclaims/reclaims, ‘this is a love story this is a love story this is a love story.’” —Jay Ward

militant (Baseline Press, 2022)

all our futures

Winner - 2020 PANK Little Books Contest

all our futures confronts a history of violence against bodies deemed disposable: sick and disabled queers and racialized people, who presently and historically faced state violence and genocide in the form of institutionalization, or incarceration, or forced sterilization. This poem refuses to turn away from the entanglements of race, class, disability, and environmental and reproductive injustice. It is an indictment of conversations about family and kinship that stop at the carbon footprint of raising children. It is a love letter to a future child. It is a reckoning with climate grief, and the worlds we build for each other, one decision at a time.

Weaving between generations and geographies, all our futures asks what it means to make a life in the face of climate and political crisis— how to let go of the shame that tells us we do not deserve to imagine a future we want, a future we belong in. Ultimately, all our futures says, home is a place we make. Though nothing is guaranteed — not time, not hope — Chan imagines a place beyond climate and political apocalypse (difficult, yes; abundant, yes) where queer, disabled people are needed, valued, loved. This is a book for artists and healers and organizers, and everyone who gives their breath and heart to the hard work, the heartwork, of movement-building.

“all our futures is a potent reckoning of physicality, reproduction and lineage. Part documentary, part confessional song and part future-manifesto, these poetic sequences dissect the legacies of eugenics against disabled and indigenous peoples. With impeccable skill, desires here are interwoven with threats of doom. It is exciting to witness such a fearsome poet as Jody Chan, who reveals a world in which “no one is born clean.” —Logan February