AustLit

'Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold’s premise is unique: 54 poems for the 46 chromosomes in the human body. Each poem is distinctive in typography and voice, gleaned from a primary source interview of a public or private figure believed to have Marfan syndrome. Often very tall, slender and gifted, those with Marfan syndrome are aesthetically, artistically, intellectually, athletically extraordinary. As the collection’s poet, Andy Jackson puts it: ‘Marfan troubles the boundaries between “disability” and “extraordinary ability”’; much anguish is caused by this illness, and there is a sense of being ‘dumb with pain / suffused with light’, ‘when the genetic stars align’’.'  (Introduction)