A review by jayisreading
Pills and Jacksonvilles by Jillian Marie Weise

reflective fast-paced

2.0

Rather unfortunately, this collection of poems didn’t work for me at all. I enjoyed Weise’s Cyborg Detective, but found Cy’s approach in style and structure this time around fell flat. There was a fair bit of personal narrative that was in dialogue with social/cultural commentary that all drew attention to queer and disabled embodiment, but I didn’t think Weise’s message came through as clearly as it could have. Also, somewhat like Cy’s previous collection, there were a fair number of assumptions that the reader will recognize the names and concepts that were scattered throughout the collection, whether it be about disability justice/activism or focusing on the literary world (e.g., awards), that might frustrate some readers due to the absence of context.

I did think Weise’s video sonnets stood out most, in the sense that it made me think a lot about the possibilities of poetry’s relationship with other media. So, I will say that I thought Cy’s experimentation with multimedia in this manner to be an interesting one.

With that said, one thing that really caught my attention that I found incredibly off-putting was how Cy went about COVID/the pandemic. As opposed to recognizing that COVID was very much present at the time of the publication of this collection (and continues to be present today), it was very odd to me that a disabled poet and activist wrote about COVID as though it’s no longer a worrying issue. I will say that this was a rather small detail that could have been overlooked quite easily by other readers (and this isn’t necessarily their fault either), but it weighed heavily on my mind even after finishing the collection.
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