impact statement by Jody Chan

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 the impacts—care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines 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