Bettah Mus' Come: When the Flesh Whispers and the Mind Roars

Bettah Mus' Come is a poetry collection of testimony and defiance from a Black Jamaican disabled woman who refuses to live inside anyone else's definition of what a life like hers should be. Moving through the intertwined territories of body, desire, society, and inheritance, these poems insist that disability is not a tragedy at the margins but a vibrant, ordinary, and vital part of being human. Across four braided sections, the book names "the pressures that try to shrink us" — ableism, racism, misogyny, state violence, religious hypocrisy, family secrets — and lingers in the intimate rooms where those forces land. The speaker writes as mother and daughter, teacher and student, lover and survivor, tracing the fault lines between what we say we value and what our systems actually do. Her voice is at once tender and unflinching, holding rage and humor, lust and faith, grief and joy in the same honest breath. Influenced by the prophetic clarity of James Baldwin, the revolutionary legacy of Judy Heumann, and a Jamaican soundscape where art is warning and prophecy, Bettah Mus' Come becomes both witness and invitation. It calls readers who know what it is to be underestimated, silenced, or pressed down to remember their own moments of being held back and, instead of turning away, to lean closer. This is a book for anyone ready to see disability as one of humanity's truest mirrors — and to leave more awake to their power to love, to resist, and to change what they can.