The Amputee's Guide to Sex
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When Jillian Weise wrote The Amputee's 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 Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room," address a lover's 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."
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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?
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