Culturally, we are conditioned to have one of three affective reactions to disability and disabled people: inspiration, pity, or disgust. The world is also full of tired tropes about people who are faking disability, or people who aren’t disabled enough. A reader needs to have a deep emotional awareness to activate empathy for disabled characters. They must be able to understand disabled stereotypes when they see them, and they must be able to measure their own emotional reactions against cultural narratives that denigrate disabled people to prioritize abled people’s feelings and experiences. But these are skills that can be practiced, and they are skills that readers—who are interested in others’ experiences, who want to feel what a character/speaker feels, who want to better understand the world—are uniquely positioned to cultivate. Empathy requires fully grappling with the ideas presented. It demands complexity, nuance, and a distinct ability to see the humanity in the “other.” This chapter highlights a contemporary renaissance in disabled poetry that creates a rich space for engaging empathy in deep and unexpected ways, with creative examples from Kelly Weber, Walela Nehanda, Tate N. Oquendo, and Tea Gerbeza.