Related posts
Description
A Los Angeles Review Best Book of the Year
Readers who can handle the hair-raising experience of Jillian Weises gutsy poetry debut . . . will be rewarded with an elegant examination of intimacy and disability and a fearless dissection of the taboo and the hidden. Los Angeles TimesWhen Jillian Weise wrote The Amputees Guide to Sex, it was with the intention of changing the conversation around disability; essentially, she was tired of seeing cripples portrayed as asexual characters. The collection that resulted is a powerful lesson in desire, the body, pain, and possession. These poems interrogate medical language and history, imagine Mona Lisa in a wheelchair, rewrite Elizabeth Bishops poem In the Waiting Room, address a lovers arsonist ex-girlfriend, and show the prosthesis as the object of male curiosity and lust. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called the book a charged and daring debut and described Jillian Weise as an agile and powerful poet . . . speaking boldly and compassionately about a little-discussed subject that becomes universal in her careful hands.
Ten years since its first publication, our culture continues to grapple with questions limned in this collection. In a new introduction, Weise revisits and recontextualizes her work, revealing its urgency to our present moment. What are the challenges of speaking for a community? How to resist the institutionalization of ableist paradigms? How are atypical bodies silenced? Where do our corporeal selves intersect with our technologies?