Aby Kaupang is a Colorado poet whose work moves through bodies, disability, grief, faith, care, neurodivergence, collaboration, domestic space, and formally adventurous lyric structures. Her books include Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable, Absence is Such a Transparent House, Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me, Radiant Tether, and & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love. With Matthew Cooperman she wrote Disorder 299.00 and NOS, disorder not otherwise specified. She holds graduate degrees in creative writing and occupational therapy and has served as Poet Laureate of Fort Collins.
Dear in January, and the poetics of address
Dear in January, begins with the grammar of correspondence. “Dear” opens a direct address and immediately creates intimacy, while “January” gives the address a seasonal and temporal setting. The comma keeps the phrase open, creating the sense that a sentence, letter, invocation, or plea is about to continue.
January carries its own cluster of associations: cold, beginning, return, resolution, dormancy, and the slow movement toward another year. Kaupang’s title brings those associations into a form that feels personal. Time receives an address usually reserved for a person. The month becomes companion, witness, addressee, or condition of speech.
This interest in temporal thresholds later appears in her writing about the new year, possibility, conditional grammar, and the double-facing figure of Janus. The page therefore gains a strong early point of entry through the relation between language and time: a month can be addressed, and a grammatical opening can hold emotional pressure before the poem begins.
Body, suffering, and the fragile house
Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable and Absence is Such a Transparent House place boundaries, dwellings, and permeability near the center of Kaupang’s imagery. Fences divide and contain. Houses shelter, expose, accumulate memory, and organize family life. Transparency makes a house visually permeable, turning privacy into something vulnerable to light and attention.
These spatial images give suffering an architecture. Pain can feel enclosed inside a body or household, and it can also cross the boundaries meant to contain it. Kaupang’s poetry repeatedly gives abstract conditions a physical location: suffering happens in rooms, bodies, medical spaces, landscapes, and linguistic structures.
Anne Boyer offers a useful neighboring route through poetry concerned with illness, bodies, care, labor, and institutional language. Both writers bring bodily experience into contact with systems that classify and manage it. Their formal strategies differ, and each page shows how contemporary poetry can give medical and bodily realities a language dense enough to hold emotional and political consequence.
Little “g” God and the pressure of faith
Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me places theology inside an intimate, almost conversational title. The lowercase “g” changes the scale of divinity. “God” remains recognizable as a charged religious word, while typography gives the figure a reduced or altered status. The phrase “grows tired of me” introduces fatigue, relationship, judgment, need, and abandonment.
The title brings spiritual language close to ordinary emotional life. Divinity can become exhausted; the speaker can feel burdensome; belief can carry tenderness and cruelty in the same field. Kaupang’s work frequently engages suffering without smoothing its contradictions. Faith appears as a living pressure shaped by love, anger, fragility, desire, and the need to keep speaking.
The book also explores corporeality, pregnancy, containment, myth, politics, and masculine textual traditions. Those concerns make the body a theological site. Questions of belief arrive through flesh, gender, reproduction, and the boundaries placed around bodies. The poem can hold spiritual aspiration beside physical exhaustion and social constraint.
Disorder and documentary collaboration
Kaupang’s collaborations with Matthew Cooperman bring disability, neurodivergence, medical systems, family life, and documentary practice into a shared poetic structure. Disorder 299.00 and NOS, disorder not otherwise specified emerge from sustained encounters with medical institutions surrounding their autistic daughter. The titles themselves carry diagnostic language into poetry.
Clinical categories are designed to name, code, and organize conditions. Poetry can expose the emotional force carried by those categories when they enter family life. A diagnostic phrase may affect treatment, expectation, identity, education, insurance, and the way a child is perceived by institutions. Kaupang and Cooperman transform that vocabulary through lyric, documentary, visual, and collaborative means.
The shared authorship matters because care is already relational. Two writers bring overlapping memories and distinct voices to the same family history. Collaboration creates a space where testimony can remain plural. Readers interested in how institutional language enters the body can also follow Daniel Borzutzky, whose poetry examines bureaucracy, classification, borders, and the consequences of administrative speech.
NOS and the language of diagnosis
The abbreviation “NOS” carries a special tension because it marks a category defined by incomplete specification. It names a condition through uncertainty. In poetry, that unstable label becomes fertile material: a system has created a term for what its own categories fail to describe precisely.
Kaupang’s work attends closely to that mismatch between lived experience and institutional naming. A child’s sensory world, communication, family relations, and developmental path exceed the compact language used on charts and forms. The poem can hold more simultaneous information than the diagnostic code, including fear, fierce love, fatigue, absurdity, bureaucratic frustration, and moments of beauty.
Readers interested in formal structures that accumulate fragments, voices, and documentary materials can continue through poetic forms. Kaupang’s collaborative books show how hybrid form can become ethically necessary when a single linear account cannot carry the complexity of experience.
Radiant Tether and relation
Radiant Tether condenses attachment into two charged words. “Tether” suggests connection, restraint, dependence, distance held within limits, and the line that keeps one body related to another. “Radiant” gives that connection light, energy, warmth, and visibility. Together the words make relation both physical and luminous.
The title resonates with Kaupang’s recurring concerns around family, care, love, disability, and the difficult work of remaining connected through pain. A tether can protect and restrict. Radiance can illuminate and expose. The phrase keeps attachment active as a structure with emotional and bodily consequences.
Sueyeun Juliette Lee provides another route through poetry where body, memory, geography, and lyric accumulation form dense relational structures. Reading the two poets side by side highlights different ways contemporary lyric can make connection perceptible through image, syntax, and spatial language.
The ampersand as a form of continuation
& there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love places the ampersand at the beginning of the title. The mark announces continuation before any preceding term is visible. It carries the energy of “and”: addition, relation, persistence, simultaneity, and the refusal of a final stop.
That conjunctive logic suits a book concerned with contemporary crisis, suicide, disability, daily life, failed promises, endurance, awe, and love. The ampersand allows conditions to accumulate. Experience can contain grief and care, exhaustion and attention, crisis and beauty, all within a structure that keeps adding.
Kaupang has written explicitly about living through “years of ampersands,” a phrase that makes conjunction a philosophy of endurance. The ampersand becomes a small visual form capable of holding continuity. The world keeps joining one condition to the next, and poetry can register that ongoingness without forcing experience into a clean conclusion.
Care work and poetic attention
Kaupang’s professional life outside academia includes occupational therapy and care work with neurodivergent and special-needs children. That practice adds another dimension to her poetry’s attention to bodies and communication. Occupational therapy works through daily acts, sensory needs, motor patterns, environments, participation, adaptation, and the practical forms of support that let a person move through the world.
Poetry and care meet through attention. Both can require patience with forms of communication that resist quick interpretation. Kaupang’s writing often makes language physically visible through fragments, spacing, symbols, conjunctions, and disrupted syntax. Those formal choices create a page where meaning can emerge through several channels at once.
Gender, body, and formal pressure
Kaupang’s writing about pregnancy, womanhood, containment, family, and spiritual pressure places gendered embodiment inside formal experiment. The page can become a site where bodily limits and textual limits interact. Broken syntax, unusual spacing, recombination, and visual interruption give pressure a visible form.
Catherine Paquette offers a useful adjacent route through poetry concerned with visual experiment, darkness, gender, and the material page. The poets work through different vocabularies, and both demonstrate how visual form can intensify questions of embodiment and identity.
Reading Aby Kaupang
Kaupang’s literary identity emerges through a closely connected field of body, faith, disability, care, family, collaboration, architecture, and grammatical relation. Her books repeatedly make abstract conditions tangible. Suffering acquires houses and fences. Attachment becomes a tether. Diagnosis becomes a title. Continuation becomes an ampersand. Time becomes an addressee in Dear in January,.
Readers exploring contemporary poets can approach Kaupang through her ability to make relation visible. Bodies relate to institutions, parents to children, collaborators to one another, faith to suffering, houses to absence, and words to the spaces around them. Her formal experimentation gives those relations shape on the page.
The strongest path through Kaupang’s work leads from intimate address toward larger systems of care and naming. Her poetry keeps the body present inside every abstraction and lets formal invention carry experiences that ordinary explanatory language compresses too aggressively. The result is a poetics of endurance, relation, vulnerability, and continuing attention.