Pills and Jacksonvilles
Poems
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fierce, provocative collection of poems exploring sexuality, queerness, the body, and disability in an ableist world
In this arresting collection, The Cyborg Jillian Weise navigates the intersection of disability and desire, wending her way through diners, bars, and dark living rooms lit by TV screens. Her words flit in and out of DMs, texts, and video chats, exploring the vital human thread that runs through the machines mediating our existence. Weaving personal narrative with cultural commentary and lyricism, these poems blur the line between flesh and technology, centering disabled and queer bodies and challenging our preconceptions of everything from opiate use to BDSM. In Pills and Jacksonvilles, Weise sharply claims “cyborg” as an identity of her own, embracing the space between human and technology and celebrating disabled culture and history.
Bold, sexy, and formally exciting, Weise’s poetry lays bare her most intimate self—pulling back the curtain on the loves, losses, and obsessions of a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weise displays a knack for blending personal anecdote with cultural critique in her energetic latest (after Cyborg Detective). The "cyborg"—and technology's relationship to humanity—remains a motif throughout. A letter to the reader explains the poet's project: "I've been stuck in ye ole nondisabled forms. So I'm inventing new ones. The poems live double lives: on the page and off the page." Accessibility is a major concern, and Weise writes about its stakes with originality and spirit: "for some poems, I put my access first. I call this move, centering the disabled writer's access before all others, cygo.ergo.nomix, with the dots in it so you know how to say." The opening poem, "A Very Kind Note to Some Poets," asks, "What are you keeping out of your poems? And why?" The highly contemporary allusions and references include Submittable, Facebook, and hashtags (the poem "Tag, You're It" is an arranged list of hashtags around the book's central considerations: "#AbleismExists/ #NotUsExactlyBut/ #AccessIsLove"). Standout entries include "DMS With Corbett O'Toole," which blends humor and pathos to remarkable effect: "I'm lost and all my goods/ are perishable. Help!" The result is a wry and inventive collection.
