NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified)
Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) is a journey of two writers who become lovers who become parents of a special needs daughter. Their experience fumbling toward understanding reveals a medical establishment strangely at odds with understanding. Their journey unpins the ground beneath them—as diagnosis, as treatment, as daily living, as language—releasing both ferocity and empathy on a scale unimagined by either party. Necessarily hybrid, NOS is a mixed-form narrative about autism and parenting, that’s also a document of trauma. In the extreme present of living a life not otherwise specified, the authors give both voice and shape to the complex journey of a family—not just one child—living with autism.
From the authors:
The etiology of autism involves the study of factors arrayed like suns in the code of spectrum. Many lights and no system. During the first five years of our daughter’s life, we spent cumulative months in hospitals, doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, psychiatric wards, therapy clinics, and laboratories. Medical encounters became existential tremors. But the other side of disorder is advocacy, and NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) documents.
Praise for NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified)
In their compelling and moving collaboration, Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman chronicle the challenges and occasional triumphs of raising a child with autism. The three letters of the book’s title, NOS, embody the reduction—the negation—of individuals and bodies to medical and psychoanalytic acronyms. The poets realize, however, that the designation of autism to describe their daughter is only a placeholder for a disorder “Not Otherwise Specified,” one which impels them into the vagaries of evaluation, diagnosis, and intervention. Nor does the designation describe the affective challenges of dealing with behavioral anomalies, silences, screaming fits, sleeplessness and trauma. At its core, the work celebrates a child’s life, however difficult, in passages that testify to the family’s resilience. Its rich formal complexity combines lyrical testimony with documentary objectivity. NOS is a vital contribution to disability poetics but also to a critical poetics of embodiment. It is a remarkable book.
—Michael Davidson
We think we know how our lives should be; we know how words fit together in a sentence. We use tests and benchmarks, charts and graphs, rules and spell-checks, to affirm these truths. Maya—the little girl at the center of this book—confounds such ways of knowing. Innominate, she inspires this book’s form and sound, similarly unclassifiable. In NOS, Kaupang and Cooperman fight for a new grammar beyond the limits of standardized lines, to 'let loose the radiant / circle of her sentence.' It’s a grammar we all need.
—Jena Osman
NOS is a book any parent of a child on the autism spectrum will recognize themselves in. In it are recorded our uncertainty, and our alienation, and our love, and our love, and our joy. But it is also art, primarily and always so, and often shines with a beauty that is painful to see and more painful to ignore—indeed, NOS does all that can be asked of art: it expands human understanding of humanity itself.
—Shane McCrae
About the Authors
Aby Kaupang is the author of Disorder 299.00, w/ Matthew Cooperman, (Essay Press, 2016), Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me (Spring Gun, 2013), Absence is Such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011), and Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2008). She holds Master’s degrees in both Creative Writing and Occupational Therapy and lives in Fort Collins, where she served as Poet Laureate from 2015–17.
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), Disorder 299.00 w/ Aby Kaupang (Essay Press, 2016), the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/ Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), and other books. A professor of English at Colorado State University, he is also co-poetry editor for Colorado Review. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.
NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) is a journey of two writers who become lovers who become parents of a special needs daughter. Their experience fumbling toward understanding reveals a medical establishment strangely at odds with understanding. Their journey unpins the ground beneath them—as diagnosis, as treatment, as daily living, as language—releasing both ferocity and empathy on a scale unimagined by either party. Necessarily hybrid, NOS is a mixed-form narrative about autism and parenting, that’s also a document of trauma. In the extreme present of living a life not otherwise specified, the authors give both voice and shape to the complex journey of a family—not just one child—living with autism.
From the authors:
The etiology of autism involves the study of factors arrayed like suns in the code of spectrum. Many lights and no system. During the first five years of our daughter’s life, we spent cumulative months in hospitals, doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, psychiatric wards, therapy clinics, and laboratories. Medical encounters became existential tremors. But the other side of disorder is advocacy, and NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) documents.
Praise for NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified)
In their compelling and moving collaboration, Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman chronicle the challenges and occasional triumphs of raising a child with autism. The three letters of the book’s title, NOS, embody the reduction—the negation—of individuals and bodies to medical and psychoanalytic acronyms. The poets realize, however, that the designation of autism to describe their daughter is only a placeholder for a disorder “Not Otherwise Specified,” one which impels them into the vagaries of evaluation, diagnosis, and intervention. Nor does the designation describe the affective challenges of dealing with behavioral anomalies, silences, screaming fits, sleeplessness and trauma. At its core, the work celebrates a child’s life, however difficult, in passages that testify to the family’s resilience. Its rich formal complexity combines lyrical testimony with documentary objectivity. NOS is a vital contribution to disability poetics but also to a critical poetics of embodiment. It is a remarkable book.
—Michael Davidson
We think we know how our lives should be; we know how words fit together in a sentence. We use tests and benchmarks, charts and graphs, rules and spell-checks, to affirm these truths. Maya—the little girl at the center of this book—confounds such ways of knowing. Innominate, she inspires this book’s form and sound, similarly unclassifiable. In NOS, Kaupang and Cooperman fight for a new grammar beyond the limits of standardized lines, to 'let loose the radiant / circle of her sentence.' It’s a grammar we all need.
—Jena Osman
NOS is a book any parent of a child on the autism spectrum will recognize themselves in. In it are recorded our uncertainty, and our alienation, and our love, and our love, and our joy. But it is also art, primarily and always so, and often shines with a beauty that is painful to see and more painful to ignore—indeed, NOS does all that can be asked of art: it expands human understanding of humanity itself.
—Shane McCrae
About the Authors
Aby Kaupang is the author of Disorder 299.00, w/ Matthew Cooperman, (Essay Press, 2016), Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me (Spring Gun, 2013), Absence is Such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011), and Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2008). She holds Master’s degrees in both Creative Writing and Occupational Therapy and lives in Fort Collins, where she served as Poet Laureate from 2015–17.
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), Disorder 299.00 w/ Aby Kaupang (Essay Press, 2016), the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/ Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), and other books. A professor of English at Colorado State University, he is also co-poetry editor for Colorado Review. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.
