Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collectionDrawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled...

Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collection

Drawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled transMad approach, investigating ways of knowing, loving, and living not legible to the normative eye. This collection challenges the architecture of institutional psychiatry and its popular "wellness" analogues, offering instead a counternarrative of forced institutionalization, disorderly embodiment, and transMad self-determination.

At once jarring and joyful, Differential Diagnosis interrogates psychiatric power and locates capacities for disabled and/or transMad resistance in the oblique, the speculative, and the "nonsensical." Cavar's inventive full-length debut defamiliarizes cis, sane, abled existence through linguistic play and speculative imagery, offering Madness not only as poetic content, but also as craft technique and, ultimately, as a new way of being in the normative world.

Author: Cavar
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Published: 03/16/2026
Pages: 75
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9798899480058

About the Author

CAVAR is the author of the novel Failure to Comply and editor in chief of manywor(l)ds. Their work can be found in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Cavar holds a PhD in cultural studies from the University of California, Davis.