The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight

As befits this daring exploration of a life that defies clear categories and boundaries, Naomi Cohn’s revelatory memoir The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight shapeshifts between lyric essay and prose poetry and traverses the divides between lived experience, history, and scientific knowledge. Told in the form of imagined alphabetical encyclopedia entries, this meditation on progressive vision loss examines and illuminates Cohn’s at first halting then avid embrace of braille as part of relearning to read and write as an adult. Using etymology, historical and medical research, and personal vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked micro-essays and prose poems is both Cohn’s singular story of grieving and refashioning a life built around words and an evocation of the larger discussion of how our society views disability. The Braille Encyclopedia is poignant, playful, and wry, providing a literary reckoning of the technical and emotional aspects of facing the loss of sight.