The American writer Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Reading My Body is a Meadow, I got the sense that poet and activist Bethany Handley crossed this border when she became a full-time wheelchair user in her twenties. Her latest book reckons with everything this journey has cost her, and everything it has also helped her gain.

As a child, Handley spent much of her time outdoors, playing in the woods near her family home and, at weekends, surfing in the ...

 

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