The Amputee's Guide to Sex

by Jillian Weise

Overview

A paradigm-shifting collection about disability and desire, recontextualized with an introduction by one of our most provocative contemporary poets.

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."

In the 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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593760205
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jillian Weise is a poet, performance artist and disability rights activist. She is the author of The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007), The Colony (2010) and The Book of Goodbyes (2013), which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, The Huffington Post and The New York Times and many other publications. Weise is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Fulbright Program, the Lannan Foundation, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is an Associate Professor at Clemson University.

Read an Excerpt

I. Removal of the Prosthetic


Wait for partner to exit room, or initiate their exit by requested a favor. For example, “Could you check the front door? I can’t remember if I locked it.” Wait for shadows to stand still, then quick, under the covers, remove the prosthetic. Let it slip beneath the bed, under clothes, behind a door.



II. Foreplay


To create an uninhibited environment for your partner, track their hands like game pieces on a board. For leg amputees, keep arms on upper body. For arm amputees, keep arms on lower body. Engage with like limbs. Keep half-limbs out of reach. Your goal is to achieve a false harmony with their body.



III. Sex


Mobility is key. If they see the half-limb then they become inhibited, nervous. They think: “Will it hurt like this? Would she tell me if it did?” Mobility shows confidence. Think for two people. Know where your limbs are at all times; know where your partner’s limbs are at all times.

Table of Contents

Translating the Body     1
The Amputee's Guide to Sex     3
Notes on the Body (1)     4
Below Water     5
Waiting Room     6
Sleep Talk     8
Abscission     9
How the Dumb Were Granted the Right to Have Sex     11
Notes on the Body (2)     13
Nikita's Indian Restaurant     14
During the Reign of the Alter Ego     16
Despite     18
The Old Questions     19
The Scar on Her Neck     20
The Local Human Being     21
Meeting Nona in a Dream     22
Notes on the Body (3)     24
Half-Portrait     25
Portrait of the Author After X-Ray     26
Body as Cloud     27
Nona Come Sit     28
Body as Harbor     29
Notes on the Body (4)     30
Beautiful Freak Show     31
Conviction     32
Us, Like a Bad Mix Tape     33
Help Your Physician Better Understand Your Pain     35
Help Your Physician Better Understand Your Pain     37
There is there that screw     40
The Body in Pain     41
Cur     46
The Surgeon     47
Of Holman     49
Laundry     51
Introductions     53
Holman, Age 10     54
Water, Please     55
The Arrangement     56
Tact     58
Incision     59
Training Wheels     60
Ode to Agent Orange     61
Laura Wingfield, Femme Fatale     62
Holman's Two Feet     63
Erase     64
Subversive     65
I Want You to Know This     66
Call to Ani After Holman (Again) Messes Up     68
The Gift     70
Bust     71
How Young, How Bad     72
Fragments     73
Olympia     74
The Interview     75
Wildebeest     76
Bough     77
Let me be reckless with the word love     78
Epilogue     79
Body as Argument     81
Notes     83

Editorial Reviews

"In her charged and daring debut, Weise artfully interweaves biographical details with meditations on the history of disability and sex, laying bare the complexities of finding sexual and emotional intimacy as an amputee with a prosthetic leg . . . An agile and powerful poet, Weise references medical literature, history and poetry, speaking boldly and compassionately about a little-discussed subject that becomes universal in her careful hands. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

"With deadpan heartbreak and powerful invention, Jillian Weise raids the border-territories between the human body and the arts, creating in her poetry a devastating imaginary space where immortal representations of face, limb and torso jostle and translate (beautifully, dangerously) into the transient flesh and bone of the perceived real world." —Josh Bell, author of No Planets Strike

"The poems in Jillian Weise’s The Amputee’s Guide to Sex perform an earthy, flamenco-like stomp and full-throated Whitmanesque song (the extended remix), reaching notes as daring and feeling as crushingly good-looking: This is my skin, my body and I am too / alive, electric, meat and metal." —Major Jackson, author of Hoops and Leaving Saturn

"Weise’s book is fiercely and unabashedly feminist. In reading it, I was reminded in all the most complex and interesting ways of the role of the body in that troublesome triangle of sex, love, and politics: a triangle with deep implications for the feminist movement." —So to Speak Journal

"The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007), is a bold investigation of disability and sexuality." —Poetry Foundation

From the Publisher

In her charged and daring debut, Weise artfully interweaves biographical details with meditations on the history of disability and sex, laying bare the complexities of finding sexual and emotional intimacy as an amputee with a prosthetic leg. In three sections, her assured voice masterfully navigates the potential pitfalls of her subject matter-from the risk of self-pity (there is none here) to the difficulties of speaking for her community. In the first section, evidence of this speaker's disability is hidden, ignored, or the object of curiosity and desire ("Your favorite post-coital pastime/ is nicknaming my scars"); it is also a fiercely guarded possession ("...I caught/ you staring at the railroad tracks/ along my spine, and I thought/ Mine, mine"). Part two borrows impersonal medical language to poetically redress the terminology of pain: "When and how did your pain problem start?... He met me in a dark alley." The third section imagines life and love alongside a character named "Holman." Weise also reproduces the cruelest examples of male fascination, as when the speaker's grandfather calls her the "prettiest cripple I ever seen." An agile and powerful poet, Weise references medical literature, history and poetry, speaking boldly and compassionately about a little-discussed subject that becomes universal in her careful hands. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly