Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

Christopher Jon Heuer (1970– )

245  Christopher Jon Heuer (1970– ) The six poems here by Christopher Jon Heuer make up three pairs: pangs of wistfulness, snapshots of a Deaf man under duress, and sarcastic scoffs. As different as these poems are, they all have Heuer’s trademark intensity. “Visible Scars” is particularly illuminating about the difficulty in putting a finger to audism, which is most often subtle but very destructive, and the challenge of proving to people outside and inside the community that it does exist. The scars of audism are invisible, so Heuer pines for hearing slave overseers with whips to inflict visible scars. This is just one reason why Deaf poetry can be such a valuable political weapon. Heuer’s poems succeed in making legible the scars created by a fellow deaf person in denial, a father who never signs, the charade of being “fine” among hearing nonsigners, and the dismissiveness of others , even those who know what it is like to be oppressed but whose scars are different. Both “Koko Want,” which pokes fun at anthropologists ’ fascination with signing monkeys, and “We Can Save the Deaf!,” a “fight song” of professionals in the “field of deafness ,” use satire to heal the wounds inflicted by their subjects. Christopher Jon Heuer began to lose his hearing immediately after birth. He was fitted with his first hearing aid in the second grade and did not learn American Sign Language (ASL) until he was fourteen. Heuer attended public schools, except for two years at the Wisconsin School for the Deaf. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Heuer has worked in California, at various odd jobs, and with deaf students in the Milwaukee public schools. He met his wife, an ASL interpreter, while working as a camp counselor. In 1999, they moved to Virginia, and Heuer began teaching English at Gallaudet University. He has completed the coursework toward Christopher Jon Heuer 246 his doctorate in adult literacy and educational counseling from George Mason University, and is now working on his dissertation. Heuer has contributed to the anthologies No Walls of Stone and The Deaf Way II Anthology, and his collection of poetry is All Your Parts Intact (2003). In 2007, his social commentary was collected in Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution. ...