What's that

Gareth Farmer's What's That: Instead of Ego II - Acrostic Aftermaths & Other Poems is a structurally intricate and linguistically dense exploration of autism, neurodivergence, and the burdens of normativity. Centred on a series of acrostic poems that extract meaning from clinical and social terminology, the collection refracts lived experience through formal constraint, lexical play, and ironic defamiliarisation. Farmer navigates states of overload, rejection, mimicry, and disassociation with a restless intelligence that interrogates both language and the systems it reflects. 'Sensory environments must be disabling, otherwise this dissenting is disingenuous', Farmer states, distilling the work's confrontation with the contradictions of institutional legibility. What emerges is a poetics of embodied resistance-cognitive, affective, and unapologetically complex.