Contender of Chaos

Contender of Chaos explores the poetic life and exposition of the inner life of a woman with a visible disability: the experiences, challenges, and the people and places she has known and loved. It is a life not ordinary or compromised, but one of reflection and self-discovery. This chapbook is the author's first published collection. It includes poems written in the late 60's, but most have been written, or revised, in the past 10 years. Many refer to a love of nature and coming to terms with a world that is often inviting and yet, unwelcoming at the same time. The poet has always been fascinated by her observations of how people relate to her and to each other. The poems hint at the struggle to understand her own sexuality as a woman with a disability, that affects speech and coordination. Creating a world full of lively adventures, finding a life-long love and having a family of one's own, engaging in intellectual pursuits, and building a diverse group of friends and colleagues have challenged the assumptions and stereotypes that many have about people with physical disabilities.

About the Author :
Laureen is currently a member of "Writing a Village" poetry workshop in Takoma Park, MD. led by the former Poet Laureate of the city, Anne Becker. She divides her time among her work, advocacy for people with disabilities, and family, including her two precocious grand-children.

Review :
In her refreshingly unsettlingly collection of poems, Summers reflects on the rich complexity of her life as a sexual woman with a disability, a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, neighbor, intimate friend, weaver, and writer. The fullness of her life and the intense emotions she expresses in many of the pieces--desire, lust, love and anger--will persuasively challenge and powerfully undermine stereotypical views of what it means to be a woman with a disability. --Harilyn Rousso, disability activist, feminist, author of Don't Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back Laureen Summers' poems speak in an intimate, vulnerable, straightforward and powerful voice. Tell their stories of bodies in motion in often simple declarative sentences that pop out of the uncertainty, turmoil, restlessness and greed of human existence in the 21st century. Present vignettes of imaginary and real people. Full of desire, anger, fear, humor, movement and change, brimming with great sympathy, they explore the universe of love in all its contingency, its storms, its swerving orbits. Contender of Chaos allows us to persist on planet Earth where "fragile lives hang in the balance between healing and despair." --Anne Becker, author of Human Animal The title of the first poem in Contender of Chaos declares: "This Is About a Body." In the poems that follow, Laureen Summers maps the daily experience of that body's limitations, reflecting on how we suffer, celebrate and in some sense re-create the bodies that we are. Her straightforward and often humorous lines direct us to recognize the challenges we share, as well as those particular to people who must rely on "messages from the brain that confuse their movements." These poems speak of joy and note despair without giving way to it. Instead, as in "Hurricane Irene," Summers recasts an instrument of disaster as a surprising model for strength and persistence: "She understood chaos... She was the woman of my dreams." --Beth Joselow, Poet; author of Begin at Once