Estuary Books is a Boutique publishing house set up to foster the writing and publishing of poetry written by people with disabilities and its dissemination to readers looking for insights into disability through the distilled experience of people coping and living with disabilities.
The established publishing houses are ever-increasingly closing to new poets as they struggle to publish from their lists of previously published poets returning with new manuscripts. Where houses receive subvensions from arts-related grants, these too are constricting what the publisher can afford to “risk” in publishing the new poet and publishing something so different as poetry written in the language and the voice of disability.
The experience of disability, when written into poetry, cannot dispense with a framework of structure and precision. Issues and events which may seem to be cathartic and to be too much the raw pain of difference do not easily resonate with people who have not experienced a major disability or been exposed to a relationship of somebody who has a disability.