Differential Diagnosis

If you’ve been following the poetry world lately, you’ve probably heard whispers about an upcoming collection that’s generating serious anticipation. Differential Diagnosis, a poetry collection scheduled to release in March 2026 from Curbstone Books (under the Northwestern University Press umbrella), is one of those rare books that feels urgent even before it hits shelves. And honestly, once you understand what this work is attempting, you’ll understand why the literary community is already buzzing about it.

What we’re looking at is a 96-page collection of poems that’s set to explore some of the most vital and underdiscussed intersections in contemporary queer and disabled life. The title itself is a deliberate act—taking a term from medical diagnostics and repurposing it as a lens for examining identity, liberation, and the ways we understand ourselves and each other. It’s the kind of conceptual move that signals an author thinking deeply about language, power, and what poetry can do when it refuses conventional categories.

This is a book that will arrive at a moment when we desperately need new voices grappling with mad liberation, queer liberation, and the lived experiences of transgender and nonbinary people. The themes being explored speak directly to urgent conversations happening in our culture right now.

What makes this collection particularly anticipated is the author’s commitment to centering marginalized perspectives that are often sidelined even within LGBTQ spaces. By weaving together concerns about disability, gender identity, and liberation movements, the work is positioned to offer something genuinely expansive—not just poetry about being queer or trans, but poetry that thinks through what liberation actually means when you’re navigating multiple identities simultaneously.

Here are some of the key thematic territories this collection is anticipated to explore:

• Mad liberation – challenging psychiatric and medical frameworks that pathologize difference
• Queer and transgender liberation – moving beyond visibility politics toward genuine freedom
• Disability justice – centering disabled experiences and perspectives throughout
• Nonbinary identity and expression – exploring gender beyond the binary in innovative poetic language
• Intersectional resistance – showing how these struggles are interconnected and inseparable

The publication through Curbstone Books is significant in itself. Northwestern University Press, via its Curbstone imprint, has a proven track record of publishing work that challenges mainstream narratives and centers voices from the margins. This isn’t a collection that’s going to be shelved quietly—it’s being positioned as intervention, as a statement, as necessary reading.

What’s particularly exciting is that this collection will arrive in a literary landscape increasingly hungry for poetry that refuses to separate the personal from the political, the medical from the existential, the individual from the collective.

When Differential Diagnosis is released in March 2026, it will be entering conversations about how poetry itself can function as a diagnostic tool—not to label or pathologize, but to illuminate, to name, to resist. The author is clearly working with the idea that naming our conditions (medical, social, political) isn’t about acceptance of oppressive frameworks, but about claiming the language and power to define ourselves.

There’s something radical about a poetry collection that uses the language of diagnosis without accepting the violence embedded in diagnostic systems. It’s a clever reclamation—taking the tools used to control us and reshaping them into instruments of liberation. That’s the kind of conceptual sophistication that makes a book matter beyond its publication moment.

For readers already familiar with contemporary queer and disabled poetics, this is an anticipated arrival. For those new to these conversations, this collection is anticipated to serve as an accessible yet intellectually rigorous entry point. The brevity of the collection (96 pages) suggests concentrated, powerful language rather than sprawling narratives—which, in poetry, often means maximum impact.

The fact that this book is still months away from publication and already generating interest tells you something important: people are ready for this work. They’re waiting for voices that refuse easy categorization, that reject the false choice between celebration and critique, that understand that true liberation means rethinking even the language we use to describe ourselves.

Mark March 2026 on your calendar. This is one of those collections that will matter not just to readers seeking representation (though it will absolutely serve that function), but to anyone interested in how contemporary poetry is grappling with some of the most pressing questions of our time. Differential Diagnosis is anticipated to be essential reading—the kind of book that shifts how you think about liberation, identity, and the power of language itself.