Amputee’s Guide To Sex
When Jillian Weise began to write her poems in The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, it was to change 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.
In the ten years since its first publication, our culture continues to grapple with questions limned here. 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 institutionalisation of ableist paradigms? Where do our corporeal selves intersect with our technologies? How are atypical bodies silenced?Â
