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A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe is a hybrid collection of lyric essays, poems, dictionary erasures, and artworks that emerged out of the poet’s diagnosis, in their mid-twenties, with a connective tissue disorder. Slipping in and out of intimate interiors, open fields, city sidewalks, flowering gardens, construction sites, doctor’s offices, and fluctuating shorelines, the speaker gathers answers to the question: What holds us together when the body falls apart? Imperfect solutions arrive in the form of queer intimacy and kinship, long-term relationships with landscapes, collections of strange and familiar objects, and language itself. A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe is constantly breaking and and putting itself together in a messy cycle of adaptation and resistance.

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Published by The Operating System in Spring 2019, distributed worldwide by Ingram, and available by request wherever books are sold or borrowed. Please support small presses, independent booksellers, and your local library as much as possible. Free PDF copies for reviewers and low-income readers are available in The Operating System’s digital Open Access Library This is a great option for students, teachers, community members, low-income readers, and those who need or prefer a digital reading experience. Just visit this link, scroll down to 2019 Projects, and open the tab labeled with my book title. If you wish to tip me for your digital copy, I happily accept Venmo @thebodyconnected and PayPal at paypal.me/thebodyconnected.

”A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe is one of the most necessary books I’ve ever encountered. The speaker’s experience of disability—burning, light, love, and everything else—covers the body like a new skin. The breathtaking visual elements scaffolding the work are its bones, and with each new line we are reminded: “Bless these sensations more tenacious than pain.””

—Tate N. Oquendo, multimodal poet & essayist

“What occasions assembling a new body? Is language even sufficient for this task or does it always demonstrate its own body-forming shortcomings? So much literature from marginalized spaces has contended with these question. In A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe, poet and multimedia artist D. Allen finds their voice among erasures from dictionary definitions, lyrical polyphony, the urgency of second person, and the tug-of-wars between rural and urban spaces for people with disabilities to ritualize gestures of survival in sites arrowed with pain, destruction, surveillance, and control. Allen offers us their own visual productions—with echoes of Joseph Cornell’s boxes—and assembles centos on the page to find the “knife” in all of us and to ask what it’s there to do. “To inhabit a body with secrets welded inside every cell is to live in a place without learning its landscape,” they write, evoking how living with disability can be a constant process of (re)orientation, (re)acquaintanceship, and (re)fermentation. What does the disabled body want today that it couldn’t foresee wanting last week? Is the disabled body the impetus for a new metaphysical world? As Allen has sewn this collection, I too have lived with these poems. I’ve watched them become what you, necessary reader, hold before you. I hope they offer you the same resoluteness they’ve offered me.“

—Roy G. Guzmán, author of Catrachos

Excerpts and previous versions of A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe have been published at District Lit, Rogue Agent, Connotation Press, Black Warrior Review, Lockjaw Magazine, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, and elsewhere.