Reviewed by Summer Block
5.30.07

In The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, poet Jillian Weise explores the sexual and emotional lives of the disabled, marshalling autobiographical detail and historical anecdote into a multifaceted account of our cultural unease. Herself disabled (she underwent an above-the-knee amputation as a result of a birth defect), Weise writes with rare humor and energy about pain, embarrassment, desire, and loss.

Weise’s debut sets up a difficult critical puzzle. To focus on her work as a universal treatment of the human bodily condition threatens to reduce her particular struggles to the level of our ordinary insecurities, sloppily equating the trauma of an amputated limb with the usual daily bloat and wrinkle. But the alternative is equally perilous—to reduce Weise’s incisive observations to waiting room hand-holding and label her a “disabled writer;” that is, a writer for disabled people. This gray area is precisely the space Weise’s writing illuminates, the juncture where otherness becomes everyday.

"You say I'm obsessed/with bodies; they are nothing, they are everything," Weise writes in "The Local Human Being.” Her narrators are often obsessed—defensive, possessive, self-sabotaging, guarded. Some zealously protect their otherness, as in one of the compilation’s strongest poems, “Below Water”: “We used to strip bare, until I caught//you staring at the railroad tracks/along my spine, and I thought//Mine, mine.”

After a lifetime of stares and silences, some analyze every passionate embrace: “He says I think too much. He only wants to lie/beside me naked,” in “Notes on the Body (1);” In “An Amputee’s Guide to Sex,” under the heading “Foreplay”: “To create an uninhibited environment for your partner, track their hands like game pieces on a board.”

Some long for normalcy, as in “The Old Questions” (“When I asked you to turn off the lights,/you said, Will you show me your leg first?//I heard Rachmaninov through the wall,/a couple making love without prerequisites”). Others long for bodily oblivion, as in “Below Water”: “I wish we could always be//a horizon of faces, hidden bodies.”

Never skittish, Weise plumbs the erotic possibilities of the taboo and transgressive, including the “fake-leg festishist” in “During the Reign of the Alter Ego.” And, in “Beautiful Freak Show,” catching a voyeur, she spits, “I wanted to tell you I’m doing this/for myself. You think I care for/this body? Watch.”

Weise’s work is crisp, specific, and grounded in her experience of pain and dislocation. Is it glib to say, well, haven’t we have all felt this way? Most of Weise’s readers will not have felt the need to quickly hide their prosthetic leg while their lover is out of the room, as the narrator in “An Amputee’s Guide to Sex;” nor will they have been asked by an uncle to disrobe and show off their reconstructed rib cage, as in “Erase.”

Except that often, we do feel this way. We want to assert somehow that we are not our bodies, that we feel trapped in these husks that are vulnerable and insufficient. Like the narrator addressing her scars in “Abscission,” we want to say, ““These are not-me, the not-leg/beside the bed for you to trip over.” We feel pain, humiliation, and masochistic desire, and we long to reveal ourselves in a relationship that is non-judgmental, understanding, and easy. In this way, Weise speaks not just for herself, or for her “community” of fellow disabled people, but for all readers.

Where The Amputee’s Guide to Sex is most interesting, though, is where it explores another universal feeling, exploring the ways in which we all construct meaning from culture. The Amputee’s Guide is a veritable compendium of cultural references, from Apollinaire and Virginia Woolf to the Symposium and The Glass Menagerie. Weise references the medieval treatment of the mute and the legendary mutilation of the masons who built the Taj Mahal. In “Half-Portait,” she “dream[s] the Mona Lisa into a wheelchair;/she smirks behind glass with a victory stare.” In “Body as Argument,” she dispassionately analyzes our culture’s rules of beauty: “Before normal, there was ideal. The face on the billboard with the bottle of perfume, not ideal. Athena and Aphrodite, ideal,” before adding, “The woman is not ideal but has two knees.”

Weise’s strongest cultural reading may be in her poem “Waiting Room,” an allusion to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” in which a young girl hears her aunt cry out in pain at the dentist and is overwhelmed with the force and terror of empathy. Weise’s own daring cry confronts the reader with the limits of their bodies and their imaginations.