Impact Statement - Paperback

by Jody Chan (Author)

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PAT LOWTHER AWARD

A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.

Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan's impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and "money models of madness," and "wellness" checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto--and how the "wrong" kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite the impacts--care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.

Author Biography

Jody Chan is a writer, drummer, organizer, and therapist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press), all our futures (PANK), and sick (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. They are also a performing member with Raging Asian Womxn Taiko Drummers. They can be found online at https: //www.jodychan.com/, and offline at libraries and dog parks.