When I first saw this book's title, I thought it was a sex manual. I thought it might be a procedural guide for positions and helpful hints on the ethics and etiquette for sex with an amputee. It's not.
Then I was afraid that it would be another "Even though I'm an amputee, I'm just like you" book. It's not that either.
Instead, Jillian Weise does something different. As helpful as such a handbook might be, Weise does us one better. She guides us into a more intricate and immediate landscape of her body -- and our own.
The slender volume of 81 pages is a meditation upon perfect and imperfect bodies.
She includes poems entitled, "The Body as Cloud" and "The Body as Harbor." Four poems entitled "Notes on the Body" are spread throughout the first section of the book. In the first poem, she writes:
He says he likes sleeping with me. He sleeps
with metal rods and believes they are human.
Her poetry has immediate relevance. In 2006 3.8 million American women received cosmetic injections of botox, as well as nearly 1 million chemical peels and 754,000 hyaluronic acid treatments--all in the name of "perfection." Weise reminds us about the humanity and sensuality of the "imperfect" body. She charts out a journey of intimacy neither denying nor glorifying her amputation. In fact, she offers startling images of what it's like inside her own skin.
In the first poem of the volume, by the same name as the book, she writes:
Think for
two people. Know where your limbs are all times; know
where your partner's limbs are at all time.
She makes a text of her own body. She recites and translates it to the reader. Her language is sparse, almost clinical, in its ability to analyze, articulate and to shatter. Weise uses a pain assessment tool by a physician for her poem "Help Your Physician Better Understand Your Pain" and cites the source in the endnotes. Even though her metaphors are clinical and precise, they are also deeply intimate and startling. Her verse informs and grabs the reader with their stark simplicity. Weise records the statistics of her surgeries. Her poems are not for the fainthearted.
One of my favorites is a poem called "Cur" where Weise likens her pain to "that dog/that persistent barking bitch." Then, in the space of six short lines, she likens love to pain:
...obstinate as an itch
in a body cast.
Her images make surgical cuts on the reader as well. The author neither spares herself nor her readers. In "Abscission" her body is the manuscript where her scars are written. Her lover gives them names.
Your favorite post-coital pastime
is nicknaming my scars.
The name for the railroad track
Along my back-Engine.
The dots on myth wrist from IV's
Spot.
Some authors explore what is found. Weise explores absence. She explores the void of her limb like it had a body all its own. Its absence is a palpable, physical presence, as in her poem, "Below Water."
Below water, I kick one and a half
Legs, pretend to be a mermaid.
I wish we could always be
a horizon of faces, hidden bodies.
Maybe Weise's volume is a textbook after all. It is instructive as it is startling. It lets us reach into her own skin with our own skin. It is not luxuriant language, but immediate language, language that presses into our own losses, betrays, denials, rejections, and vacant spaces. She never substitutes sentimentality for skill or self-consciousness for emotional authenticity.
While it might be tempting, after reading her volume, to think "No I know how it feels," I think the truth is that, after reading her volume, we might know how we, ourselves, might feel intimacy and sensuality more deeply. This is her gift. This was my privilege in reading her work.
The Amputee's Guide to Sex, by Jillian Weise (poems). Soft Skull Press, 2007, $14.95.
Note: Cosmetic surgery figures are from USA Today.
Originally published August 2007 - "One, Two, Orgy!"