Alongside We Travel

Book excerpt: Poetry. ALONGSIDE WE TRAVEL is the first literary anthology to gather over two dozen poets from Canada, the United States, the UK and Israel whose lives are intertwined or affected by the autism spectrum. Included in this anthology are poems from tutors and teachers, aunts and grandmothers, friends and siblings, and from poets with autism themselves. Most of the work here is by highly accomplished poet-parents of autistic children written in a variety of traditional and experimental forms. But be warned. Much of the work articulates the despair, guilt, anger, as well as the joy that arises from engagement with such a complicated and diverse disability. As the editor Sean Thomas Dougherty writes, "I can only hope the range of these poems teaches you, the reader, what they have taught me, the editor, about my own autistic daughter, about art, and how we can be brought together through language towards love." All NYQ Books royalties earned on sales will be donated to Sharing the Weight, a small nonprofit out of Iowa doing a simple amazing thing: gathering people together to hand sew and make weighted blankets for autistic children.