The Amputee's Guide to Sex [Paperback]

Jillian Weise (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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.)
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Review

"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

"[A] stunning set of poems capturing the physical and emotional struggles of missing a limb." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The Amputee's Guide to Sex places a teacup to the body, and what the ear takes in is stunning. Jillian Weise offers the cadence of taboo and calls for us to dance. The singularity of experience will resonate with every reader through her muscular language; taut lines; and original, striking images that bring a wave of emotional resonance. And I'm convinced these are the kind of poems that change a reader's life." -- A. Van Jordan, author of M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A

"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. The body of the Mona Lisa is imagined in a wheelchair, a lover's body transforms into Michelangelo's David (which is not as nice as it might sound), and the speaker breaks into and out of various coporealities with the controlled panic of a career safecracker. Bodies, this poet tells us, `are nothing...are everything,' and one gets the sense that Weise feels the same way about the poems she inhabits, so physical is her relationship to the language she employs, masterfully, to embody the ineffable. This is a lovely and unsettling debut." -- Josh Bell, author of No Planets Strike

Product Details

• Paperback: 84 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (February 22, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933368527
• ISBN-13: 978-1933368528
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,168,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A heart-felt collection of poems from a neat lady, March 28, 2007

By 

Dennis Lapp "strokesurvivor" (Cincinnati, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Paperback)

I have no idea what to write. I'll start with the truth and hope to stay there. I was walking through the store of a major book chain in Kenwood today, by happenstance my fifty-first birthday. I was headed to U.S. History which now is near the poetry section. I've never bought a book of poetry in my life until today, but the title caught my attention and I had to give it a read. I am not an amputee but I am disabled as I have substantially no use of the left side of my body. I'm very sensitive to the disabled and particularly to the asexual assumptions typically made about people with disabilities. Never before have I seen the issue treated with such sensitivity. I would like to quote briefly one line from page 9 and the poem, "Abscission,": "Your favorite post-coital pastime is naming my scars. The name for the railroad track along my back--Engine."
This book of poems had an affect on me in a powerful way. I feel less alone and in some ineffable way, comforted by them. Jillian Weise has performed a service for those of us who believe themselves too mangled to be attractive sexually to others. I recommend this book without reservation.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Boy, did I have to censor this review..., May 11, 2007

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Paperback)

Jillian Weise, The Amputee's Guide to [...] (Soft Skull, 2007)

"Your favorite post-[...] pastime
is naming my scars.
The name for the railroad track
along my back - Engine."
("Abscission")

There can be no denying that Jillian Weise is a powerful poet. However, when fifty-eight of her poems are collected into one eighty-one-page volume, the effect of each powerful poem, taken singly, is diminished. Weise starts looking like a one-trick pony, someone who approaches poetry as fetish. Or, worse, as therapy.

"When I hopped to the bathroom,
he shouted, prettiest cripple I ever
seen and I woke everyone up yelling
Am not, am not, am not!"
("Training Wheels")

If you pick this book up, and there's certainly every reason to, a piece of advice: read one or two poems a day, maybe one or two a week. This is not a book to be read straight through. ** ½

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jillian Weise: First She Captures our Curiosity, Then She Captures our Heart, June 14, 2007

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Paperback)

Jillian Weise is a remarkably gifted poet. Jillian Weise incidentally happens to wear an artificial leg. As her first published collection of poems she elects to utilize both aspects and the result is a series of well-crafted, intensely sensitive poems ostensibly about how people react to amputees at the level of our most vulnerable reaction: sexual attraction.

Weise is neither belligerent nor pitiful in her poems that deal with sexual encounters. She has the courage to embrace her physical status and use it as a barometer for examining how the public in general (and male lovers, in particular) responds to people with 'deformities', such as an artificial limb. Her sense of perspective allows her to see the comedy in the moment of 'discovery' of her 'differentness', relating how men react when during initial passion to the feel of plastic instead of flesh. But Wiese wisely presents the feelings as the one missing a limb: her mental state ranges from pain to anger to daring to pride and at each step her poems reach in a few well-chosen words a level of communication that is astonishingly fine.

Some of the poems in this fascinating collection address the communication barriers between physician and patient in dealing with frank discussions about quality of life status: they are illuminating. She also provides little guides to couples in their preparation for intimate activity, couples where one who has a missing limb and the other is 'whole'.

Most people will pick up this little book (hopefully!) because of the titillating title, AN AMPUTEE'S GUIDE TO SEX is a title that conjures all manner of responses - but mostly curiosity. And for a first volume of published poems the title may heighten the sales of the book. But once any reader opens and reads these poems, that reader will discover a powerful new poet whose manner of writing and whose communication skills are as pungent as anyone writing poetry today. Jillian Weise finds her way into our psyche and into our heart and she is a very welcome newcomer in the field of poetry! Grady Harp, June 07