In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Rob Macaisa Colgate’s poetry collection Hardly Creatures is stunningly inventive and impressively vulnerable.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Exciting, sometimes shocking…[an] astonishing first book.”
In his own words, here is Rob Macaisa Colgate‘s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Hardly Creatures:
This playlist whiplashes a bit from song to song. The disability experience is core to the collection, and core to the disability experience is, at least for me, jarring inconsistency: pain, then delight in the nonnormative, loneliness, community in excess, community fractured, loving yourself, hating yourself, loving to hate yourself. And that’s just Tuesday.
- Sleepyhead by Passion Pit
In the post-chorus of this song, there is a distorted synthesizer that seems to wobble back and forth across the auditory plane. It’s trippy, confusing, joyful, and a bit terrifying. I remember listening to this on loop when I was fifteen and earnestly trying to explain to a friend that “the post-chorus is how it sounds like when I think or when I don’t think.” I remember she stared at me. I remember tracing that exact sensation of distorted thinking as it evolved into my psychotic disorder. I remember years later, finding out that the artist behind Passion Pit was bipolar. Hardly Creatures starts with a psychotic episode in “We Do Not Enter the Gallery;” I wanted this playlist to invite the reader into a minor soundscape of my psychosis. - I Don’t Like My Mind by Mitski
I’ve been listening to Mitski since 2015, but this track from her most recent album stays with me. I try to treat my madness kindly, as if it were a roommate I must not only live with, but love. That mind-self duality is at the heart of this song, alongside an impulsive, almost-involuntarily cake binge and the subsequent shame of memory. There is something so inviting about giving yourself a moment to be covered in cake, to be physically pathetic— it allows the mental patheticism. This collection grapples a lot with how to allow those facets of disability that feel pathetic, or other modes of ugliness. - Everything is romantic by Charli xcx
This song beautifully expresses the social model of disability. When we move away from the medical model that casts disabilities as pathologies that require cure, we start to see them as value-neutral variations in human characteristic that simply require accommodation. Of course, we can take this further— that, in fact, disability is a positive difference, a source of wonder, or delight, or truth. Everything is romantic, including disability, especially including disabled people. - Liability by Lorde
Ok, yes, disability is wondrous and romantic, but it also fucking sucks. I have peers incapacitated by chronic pain, colleagues unable to go out into the world due to immunocompromise, friends entirely alienated from loved ones who don’t understand their madness. Interpersonally, medically, governmentally— we are quite literally liabilities. At least this songs makes that gorgeous. I think that very gorgeousing is the practice of living disabled. And the speaker of “Ode to Pissing” plays this song’s home album Melodrama in the third stanza. - Venus by Lady Gaga
There is a poem in the collection titled “Hôpital des Beaux Arts” and it takes the form of the Venus de Milo. The poem is one of the more direct engagements with fine art as a topic, while the collection itself takes the literal and metaphoric form of an accessible art gallery. But honestly, this song doesn’t ever directly reference the Venus de Milo. I love just Lady Gaga like water. This song is fierce, and I will take any opportunity to force it onto others. My college roommate and I even have matching Venus tattoos (not the statue or planet, or the goddess of love, but the Lady Gaga song, in case that wasn’t clear.) - Dark Parts by Perfume Genius
There is a suite of poems in the collection about Eli, the speaker’s partner. Every Eli poem functions as a bench in its respective wing of the gallery: an opportunity to rest, via a love poem about Eli taking care of the speaker. The care that Eli enacts throughout the collection feels encapsulated by chorus of this song: “I will take the dark part / of your heart into my heart.” I don’t want to think of disability as a dark part. But if it were to be, I would want my partner to take it into his heart. - Radio by Lana Del Rey
There’s a reference in the poem “History of Display” to Lana Del Rey’s album Born to Die that came out when I was in high school. Did we all depression nap while listening to it? Were we all, in her words, “chopping it up” to while Lana claimed that life was “sweet like cinnamon?” Pro-ana and pro-SH Tumblr was a wild ride. I think a lot about what are deemed to be normal adolescent struggles only earn validity as disabilities once we age into adulthood, if we are lucky enough to get there. - Native New Yorker by Odyssey
When Wendy Williams performed this song on The Masked Singer in 2020, something shifted in the culture. That performance is, to me, a religion of sorts. I can’t describe it. It’s incredible. This book seeks to remove layers of artifice from the disability experience. And somehow, for me, part of that was acknowledging that watching said video with my best friend in the park at midnight was a core memory of access intimacy for me. She stayed up late just to listen to me spiral in my pre-psychosis, laying in the grass. - Right now by Gracie Abrams
Gracie Abrams is uncool now, but before she had a larger audience she was also still probably uncool, but I’m not a very cool person and I love her earlier work. I spent a lot of time while living in Toronto conceptualizing this book and listening to this song. “I feel like myself right now,” she sings. What could that possibly mean? It is hard to know. I lifted that lyric to end the poem “Access Request,” having it immediately follow the line: “Everything is wrong.” - Throat Goat by Kim Petras
There is an iconic video of a sign language interpreter performing this song alongside Kim. The signage is so visibly profane that any sort of fluency in the language is unnecessary to pick up what’s being put down. In “Eli Interprets,” I place sign language interpretation next to Eli’s ability to interpret the speaker’s schizophasia into standard English. Disabled folks have our own modes of expression, and they are often unconcerned with literal communication. When the communication happens anyway, regardless, despite— this is a great intimacy. - Obsessions by MARINA
An entire verse in this song is dedicated to having a panic attack at the grocery store. I love to listen to this song when I’m having a panic attack at the grocery store. There are a few moments in Hardly Creatures, including “Nature Poem” and “Self-Portrait Without Sense of Self,”in which the speaker has a panic attack at the grocery store. - We Found Love by Rihanna
In Austin, Texas, every Tuesday night at Barbarella is Tuezgayz. This is quite literally the best club night that there is, so much so that it made its way in “Self-Portrait Without Sense of Self.” My best friend Gabbie and I were Tuezgayz devotees when we lived in Austin, had our schedule down to a science. I wanted the club, in the abstract and the specific, to be present in this book, because it is a site of mirth, and there is a mirth in living disabled that we must refuse to let go of. I texted Gabbie and asked her what the most Tuezgayz song, and it was a toss-up between this and “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston. - Coffee by Chappell Roan
Perhaps one of my most literal additions to this playlist. A Chappell fan since 2020, I had her album pre-saved when it dropped a week before I went off to the residency where I wrote the vast majority of this book. This track in particular became a favorite during my late-night drafting. I think the situationship vibe of the song perhaps fits my verse drama My Love is Water better than Hardly Creatures (which was written before Hardly Creatures but will be published shortly after). Regardless, I drank a lot of coffee writing both books, and had a lot of situationships, some of whom I drank coffee with. - Squidward Nose by cupcakKe
CupcakKe performed at my undergraduate spring fling, which feels illegal. There’s a video my roommate took of me making out with a stranger while cupcakKe spills profanity on the stage behind us. Then, in 2022, my partner put this song on a playlist for me when we first started dating. I listened to it every day for six months while I was marathon training, then would play it again while pregaming. It’s just so nasty. It’s hysterical. That pregame moment worked its way into “Eli’s App History,” which chronicles Eli caring for the speaker after a night out spirals out of control. - The Ha Dance by Masters At Work
This is an iconic, foundational song to the ballroom community and the art of vogue. In “Anetra Aubade,” I write about how drag performer Anetra managed to engage with the ballroom community remotely over the Internet when she found it inaccessible in her immediate location. Social media and virtual platforms get so much hate for rotting our brains, for being poor proxies for physical togetherness. But for so many disabled and queer people, they are essential, and sacred. The poem goes on to play with Anetra’s bizarre mention that her name has “six letters and three vowels” by only using words and phrases that have, well, six letters and three vowels. - Fashion! by Lady Gaga
Yeah, I’ll add a second song from ARTPOP to the playlist. Who’s going to stop me? The poem “Fashion!” wasn’t originally titled “Fashion!” but I changed the title to “Fashion!” so I could reference the song “Fashion!” by Lady Gaga. The poem is about fashion, specifically a crip fashion show at Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto that featured disabled models wearing clothes hacked and modified to not only fit their bodies, but reach towards aesthetic innovations that might not otherwise have been accessed without the impetus of disability. - Vanish Into You by Lady Gaga
I cannot listen to this song without crying, which makes listening to it at the gym really awkward. To feel so cared for by someone that, in your hardest moments, you might not only seek them out, but seek to be subsumed by them? Gag. That devastates me. That specific care is exactly what exists throughout the collection between Eli and the speaker (who, if you haven’t guessed by now, are largely modeled off my partner and myself.) Hardly Creatures ends with the speaker considering in “Eli Tidies Up” how Eli might care for him even through his death, in a reflection that mirrors how Gaga ends the song: “When I die / can I / vanish into you?”
Rob Macaisa Colgate is a disabled, bakla, Filipino American poet from Evanston, Illinois. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from UT Austin. Poems from this collection appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Best New Poets, New England Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright scholar, Rob currently serves as the managing poetry editor at Foglifter.