Product details
- ISBN 9781636284842
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Red Hen Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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“Soyer's beautiful debut is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how, why, and through what means we construct ourselves.”—Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name
Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human is a genre-defying memoir of disability, identity, and desire that fuses lyricism, myth, and medical truth to explore what it means to live and love a body defined by others.
At eight years old, Hannah Soyer had no choice but to undergo an intensive spinal fusion surgery, in order to keep her lungs from eventually collapsing. Fourteen years later, she chose another treatment for her neuromuscular condition: regular drug injections into her spinal fluid. But what does “choice” really mean, and how much weight do our choices hold?
In taut, lyrical chapters, Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human confronts and communes with bodily autonomy, medical and sexual consent, traveling abroad in a wheelchair, caregiving and caretaking, appreciating the natural world, family history, bedtime stories, fantastical creatures, Irish poetry, and the limits and wonders of language and love. A bold collection of genre-bending essays, this memoir is an investigation into what we (and our words) are capable of, as we yearn to make sense of our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit.
Hannah Soyer is a queer disabled writer living in the Midwest. She has written for nationally acclaimed publications such as The Sun Magazine, Bustle, and Cosmopolitan and is the editor of The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet: An Anthology of Disability Poetics from Sable Books (2022). Her chapbook, For When the Shapes Keep Changing, won the 2021 Nonfiction OutWrite Chapbook Competition. Hannah also happens to be a cat and chocolate enthusiast.
