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A review by laura_sackton
The Amputee's Guide to Sex by Jillian Weise
This is a sharp and searing collection about disability and desire and womanhood. The poems are tight, contained, constrained, they have this formal sharp rhythm that makes them feel solid, like walls, but you get the sense that something is about to burst out of the walls. They are specifically about being an amputee, and specifically about having a prosthetic leg, being a woman dating men and loving men as amputee. There are poems about sex, dates, medical appointments, the ordinary daily movement of life.
What I kept thinking about is how the form of these poems makes their fury burn. Because there is so much fury here, so much rage, and alongside the rage, exhaustion, a kind of fierce resignation that still she’s educating men about her body, still she is fielding these invasive questions. There is something so matter of fact about the neat lines, the lack of flashy punctuation, the tight controlled feeling of the poems that highlights the rage, that makes the rage feel almost too bright to sit with. The rage in these poems is a kind of love, it feels like a love letter to the body and the speaker. It's a rage born of love for her body but not empty love, not love that denies the complex pain.
What I kept thinking about is how the form of these poems makes their fury burn. Because there is so much fury here, so much rage, and alongside the rage, exhaustion, a kind of fierce resignation that still she’s educating men about her body, still she is fielding these invasive questions. There is something so matter of fact about the neat lines, the lack of flashy punctuation, the tight controlled feeling of the poems that highlights the rage, that makes the rage feel almost too bright to sit with. The rage in these poems is a kind of love, it feels like a love letter to the body and the speaker. It's a rage born of love for her body but not empty love, not love that denies the complex pain.
These poems are also dry and a bit funny, a humor fueled by their sharpness and sharp lines, by so many declarative statements. They also feel instructional in some ways. The titular poem is literally instructions, but beyond that it feels so much like the poems are trying to explain the realties of life in a disabled body that is so often viewed as not human, this hybrid body that is viewed as fake, not real, disgusting, a toy. Weise is trying to explain the truth of it but she won’t raise her voice, she’ll only use this simmering poetic rage, she won’t shout, she’ll just state these beautiful stark truths: Here, look. You don’t get to walk away.
“This is my skin, my body and I am too
alive, electric, meat and metal.”
She makes of anger something beautiful and burning and bright, something to destroy with but also to build with. She builds poems out of anger but also she’s building her own body on her own terms.