Kirsten Deane
POETRY TO SET US ALIGHT
Poetry has always sharpened and fed our curiosity for deep experience.
As South Africans prepare to celebrate Women’s Day, The AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates the extraordinary voice of Kirsten Deane, whose debut collection, Disabled, But (uHlanga, 2026) records the daily experiences of someone living with left hemiplegia (a form of cerebral palsy), scoliosis and epilepsy in language that is raw, honest and vulnerable. The opening poem speaks of disability as a rite of passage:
… The scars in my arms
are big girl teeth coming out…
…They call this act seizures or fits or con vulsions.
This is when my body dances, lets loose
and loses all its parts.
Each subsequent poem is a record of deep curiosity about the world and her own place in it. In one, she records how, in summer, “… if you rub your hands together / for long enough, your skin will fall off exactly as it is. / This is the time to peel and understand. / God wants to set us on fire / and we must hold the match ourselves.” In another, ‘Sixth Sense’, she describes how knowledge is passed on between generations of women, expressed in the way children sit on their mothers’ knees. She begins to imagine her own future children in this context:
… My knees
could be my sixth sense. One day my daughter will sit on them.
My daughter will fall asleep faster than she planned to. My knees
will ache and crumble into sheepskin for my daughter to count.
Did she consciously frame a coming-of-age story as she was writing these poems?
“Definitely not. I just wait for the poems, and once they are ready, I take them on a date, and pick their brains. Only then do I have a sense of what’s actually coming out of me. I never know what I’m doing when I’m writing, and I hope I never do. That’s the blessing of poetry: it exists outside of us, no matter what we do.
“For me, it’s only important that I show as much vulnerability as possible in each poem. I want people to read my work and realise that there’s no reason, no point in being anything but honest. My body teaches me how to be honest in new ways, brutal ways, childlike ways.”
Asked what meaning Women’s Day has for her, she responds:
“I want Women’s Day to celebrate vulnerability, not to find a way out of it. I have always had a complex relationship with being a woman, but I have always loved being a woman. For me, being a woman means being vulnerable, soft, delicate, strong, happy, sad. I would like women to remember that being vulnerable is a blessing, even when it feels like a weakness, especially then. When I feel weak, I feel everything.”
How does it feel for her to have launched such a bold, honest book into the world?
“There are days when I can’t believe that people are out there, reading my words, and (hopefully) believing in them. Then there are moments when I refuse to believe it myself, because it feels… like everything… And how could I put everything out into the world? It makes me want to continue putting everything I have, and everything I don’t, into the world.”
In the next few days, write a poem that uses your body as the starting point to explore and describe the world around you.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition is open for submissions until 30 November 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and find out how to enter your best words.