And I Climbed And I Climbed

In this powerful and emotionally intense collection, young Cosmo experiences a life-changing injury after he falls from a tree, and writes a series of poems addressed to this tree as a means of processing what happened to him. Other voices, including his family and the tree itself, occasionally enter the narrative, but at the core is Cosmo’s emotional life as he moves between anger, humour, resignation, frustration and more, these complex feelings reflecting the fact that there is no single story to be told about physical disability. Poet Stephen Lightbown draws on his own experiences as a wheelchair user in this articulate and memorable book.