A Los Angeles Review Best Book of the Year “Readers who can handle the hair-raising experience of Jillian Weise’s 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 Times 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.” 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?

The Amputee's Guide to Sex

Literature & Fiction

Weise, Jillian

Genre Fiction

Soft Skull

Anne Hatley is a sharp-witted and acerbic young teacher from the South, in need of a reprieve from the drudgery of work and an increasingly tedious relationship. She accepts an invitation to the nation’s largest research colony, where scientistsDNA pioneer James D. Watson among themhope to cure” Anne of a rare gene that affects her bone growth: She is missing a leg and walks with a prosthesis. Anne feels fine the way she is, and she strives to maintain her resolve under pressure from her peers and from doctors eager to pioneer an experimental procedure, which would make her the first patient to generate a new leg. Meanwhile, she falls into a reluctant romance with the rakish Nick, possessor of the suicide gene”; befriends Charles Darwin, who is on site digging through the eugenics archive; and attempts to come to terms with her first love. The Colony is the story of one young woman struggling to accept who she is, and who she will become. But it is also a novel that mines some of the most polarizing issues of our timeamong them, medical ethics, body image, and genetic engineering.

The Colony

United States

Tired of seeing cripples” portrayed as asexual characters, Jillian Weise created this stunning lesson in desire and disease. The first section presents disability in a historical context, from the first deaf and dumb” person granted the right to have sex to the surgeon who first cauterized war wounds. The middle section explores the physician as lover, and the final section depicts the rise and fall of a relationship. Characterized by a flesh-and-blood character, Holman, who also represents the larger tensions that arise between the abled and disabled.

Poetry

SOFT SKULL PRESS *

WINNER OF THE 2013 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD 
Winner of the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award 
A Publishers Weekly "Best Book of 2013" 
A NPR "Best Book of 2013" 
A Coldfront Magazine "Top 40 Poetry Book" for 2013 
These fierce, hip, heartbreaking love poems call out to a lover who can’t be lived with or without. They’re humorous, odd, and full of all the unreasonable truth of love. This book is the real thing.” Publishers Weekly 
Weise’s collection examines the daily life and consciousness of a speaker with a disability willing to confront all taboos associated with sex, intimacy, identity, gender, and love.” - Coldfront Magazine 
The Los Angeles Times described Jillian Weise's debut poetry collection as "a fearless dissection of the taboo and the hidden." In this second collection she forwards her bold, sexy poetics by chronicling an affair with a man she names "Big Logos." These poems throw into question sex, the law, identity, sentiment, and power, shifting between lyric and narrative, hyper-realism and magical realism, fact and fiction.
I've Been Waiting All Night
I reckon you were asleep with your girl before the phone rang. Make something up.
I've been waiting all night to tell you about the couple in post-War France,
the woman fresh in her grave and the man who didn't like his mistress dead,
no sir, and so exhumed her, to the dismay of his wife, who had him arrested
for the stink he made. She was reburied, returned to the dead.
After jail, he dug her up to fuck again. Attached suction cups and crafted
a wig from a broom. You can go now. I'm more in the mood than you're used to.
Jillian Weisean above-the-knee amputee with a computerized prostheticidentifies as a cyborg and has discussed the identity in essays for the New York Times and Drunken Boat. Her books include The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). She is an assistant professor at Clemson University, a contributing editor at the South Carolina Review, and co-director of the Annual Clemson Literary Festival.

The Book of Goodbyes (American Poets Continuum)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

An NPR Favorite Book of 2019
In her third collection of poems, Jillian Weise delivers a reckoning to the ableism of the Western Canon. These poems investigate and challenge the ways that nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies, from calling out William Carlos Williams to biohacking Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” to chronicling the ongoing headlines of violence against disabled women. Part invective, part love poem, Cyborg Detective holds a magnifying glass to the marginalization and fetishization of disabled people while claiming space and pride for the people who already use technology and cybernetic implants every day.

Cyborg Detective (American Poets Continuum, 174)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weise, Jillian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Weise, Jillian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weise, Jillian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Amputee's Guide to Sex

The Colony

The Amputee's Guide to Sex

The Book of Goodbyes (American Poets Continuum)

Cyborg Detective (American Poets Continuum, 174)

Cyborg Detective (American Poets Continuum, 174)