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.

About the Author

The Cyborg Jillian Weise is the author of one novel and three books of poetry, the most recent of which, Cyborg Detective, won the 2020 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Cy’s work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Poetry, and elsewhere. She created and performed the fictional character Tipsy Tullivan for a web series that ran from 2016 to 2020. During the pandemic, Cy wrote and directed the video play A Kim Deal Party. Weise has been awarded residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Fulbright Program, and the Lannan Foundation.