Foreword--As Per Verse: The Queer in the Clinic in the Poem

This essay introduces a series of poems by six authors: Rafael Campo, Susan Holbrook, Katie Price, Trish Salah, Qwo-Li Driskill, and Brian Teare. I argue that the poems demonstrate that a queer bioethics, whether literary or medical, must dispense with commonplace assumptions about the ways in which selves, especially queer selves, are represented in language. Instead, poetry’s sound-sense and avoidance of language-as-usual can serve as an analogy for modes of approach, analysis, and even recognition that do not receive official sanction; the non-linear modes of reading required by contemporary poetry can serve as methodological models for a queer bioethics.