Cath Nichols’s poetry collection This is Not a Stunt is built on a quietly radical premise: that living with disability or being trans is not a tragedy to be overcome, nor a narrative arc that demands redemption, heroism, or exceptional suffering. Instead, these poems insist on something far more subversive, the idea that such lives are simply ways of being, full of humour, romance, irritation, longing, boredom, love, and the slow accumulation of ordinary days. Nichols embraces both the mundane and the remarkable, reminding us that “We’re middle-aged, of course. Life rolls on,” and it is precisely this rolling on that gives the collection its emotional weight.
The book moves fluidly across time and place, revisiting Nichols’s childhood in New Zealand, her teenage years in Kent, and later decades spent on the gay scene in Manchester, complete with changing fashions, haircuts, and social codes. These shifts are not treated nostalgically or sentimentally, but as lived textures, moments that shape a self without needing to explain or justify it. The poems feel grounded in experience rather than theory, even when they are engaging with ideas that are politically and philosophically charged. Bodies, identities, and relationships are presented as processes rather than destinations, as acts of becoming rather than problems to be solved.
At the heart of the collection lies the sequence titled Bo(d)y-in-waiting, an intimately observed and deeply moving narrative centred on Nichols’s partner, Nate, a trans boy growing up in the 1970s. This was an era profoundly unequipped to understand trans lives, and the poems make clear that Nate’s suffering does not arise from being trans, but from being thwarted and misunderstood at every turn by institutions that refuse to listen. Vacuous doctors and sceptical teachers appear not as villains in a melodrama, but as banal agents of harm, their authority unquestioned, their ignorance devastating. In the poem “Corridor, 1973”, Nate is shown navigating life at a girls’ school, the result of an adult decision to raise him female. His unhappiness is expressed through rebellion, through resistance to rules that do not fit him. It is also in this poem that Nate makes his first enquiries about gender affirming surgery, only to be met with a comparison that reverberates through the entire sequence. A doctor tells him that such surgery would be “like cutting off the legs of a cripple”. The phrase is shocking in its cruelty, but Nichols refuses to let it sit unexamined. Instead, it becomes a point of return, a refrain that exposes how medical language has historically policed both disabled and trans bodies.
The emotional consequences of this refusal of care unfold in later poems such as “Flood”, which captures the depth of Nate’s despair after being denied help. Subsequent poems interrogate what the doctor might have meant by his words. In “Three Wishes?”, Nichols asks whether the comparison implied hope deferred, the idea that a disabled person might one day walk, or whether it simply framed the patient as fundamentally sick and beyond repair. The poem “Life Support” goes further, listing situations in which amputation is not only necessary but life-saving, frostbite, disease, catastrophic injury, before arriving at the unbearable logic faced by someone trapped in a body that others insist is wrong. If you are taken every day for someone else, if your body is constantly misread, then the desire for self-removal is not madness but a desperate attempt at agency.
The poems about disability make this point with equal clarity. In “Cloth Ears”, inspired by David Lodge’s memoir Deaf Sentence, Nichols highlights the literary tendency to treat deafness as comic, as a source of misunderstanding and farce rather than a lived reality. The poem gently but firmly critiques this impulse, exposing how humour can slide into dismissal. In the imaginative and striking poem “Accommodation”, Nichols imagines bats applying for jobs in the corporate world, only to be rejected because their needs have not been considered. Yet the bats are not portrayed as weak or deficient. When seen in their own environment, wheeling through the evening sky, catching insects with ease, they are agile, skilful, and perfectly adapted. The problem, as always, lies not with the body but with the space that refuses to accommodate it.
This insistence on context, on environment, on social framing, is what gives the collection its quiet power. Nichols does not ask for pity, and she does not offer inspiration. There is no misery memoir here, no attempt to wring emotion from suffering for its own sake. Instead, the poems are resolutely relatable, inviting readers who are cisgender or able bodied to recognise emotions they already know, frustration, longing, love, shame, tenderness, while also asking them to question the structures that determine whose bodies are deemed acceptable.
In the afterward, Nichols expresses concern that the poems might not be “sufficiently poem-y”, that they are too descriptive, too grounded in narrative, leaving little space for readers to insert their own experiences. Yet this fear seems unfounded. The clarity of the poems is precisely what allows them to resonate. They are specific without being exclusionary, intimate without being confessional in a way that demands identification. Nichols walks a careful line, inviting empathy without appropriation, and she does so with remarkable steadiness.
This balance is particularly evident in the repetition of the line about cutting off the legs of a cripple. As it echoes through the sequence, it gathers new meanings, forcing the reader to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it too quickly. Nichols understands that unease can be productive. She does not provide a neat timeline of transition for Nate, nor does she satisfy the reader’s curiosity about bodies and medical processes. Nate is referred to as “he” throughout, refusing the idea that trans lives must be explained step by step for an audience. This refusal may unsettle some readers, but that unsettled feeling is itself instructive. It reveals how accustomed we are to demanding clarity, access, and narrative closure.
Formally, the collection is varied. While much of it leans toward free verse and narrative clarity, Nichols includes a beautifully crafted pantoum titled “Reading Would Save Me”. Its repetitions are so smooth they almost disappear, mirroring the poem’s meditation on expectation and disappointment, on the hope that books might offer salvation. The poem circles inward, echoing its own lines, enacting the very sense of inward growth it describes.
Available via Amazon
Photo via gaspoertyartandmusic
Post a Comment