Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
While irreducible to any distillation, Jillian Weise’s third poetry collection, Cyborg Detective, could be said to communicate to its readers through a conglomerate of approaches that I will summarize here as an ethical trifecta. I interpret her five-section poetic hologram as combining an ethics of care and accountability; an ethics of irony, humor, and serious play; and an ethics of demand, refusal, and resistance.
Through a decidedly pro-crip framework, Weise calls out the trenchant ableism that has existed (seemingly always) and continues to seep across the Western poetics landscape and its broader writing canon. By extension, and sometimes quite directly, she asks the poets and other writers—those living and no longer with us—to take responsibility for using metaphors of disability, insisting on a cease and desist. Disability metaphors can only be used irresponsibly by non-disabled people, Weise asserts; sometimes, even the disabled using metaphors as insiders take risks that end up proving to have been more troubling than worthwhile.
Simultaneously, through deft angling (calling it agile might be ableist—no joke), Weise calls in readers. Even if we readers aren’t in some shared virtual room reading Cyborg Detective, Weise summons a holo-deck crowd, calling us to task through various wormholes, by using her aforementioned irony and playfulness to insist that we as poetry readers think through and act upon some serious stuff. Throughout both the individual poems and the book’s overall structure, a layered question appears, rising to the surface: Is our apparent complicity with the slew of ableist poetry intentional, borne of ignorance and misapprehension, or based upon other reasons, rationales, and rationalizations?
Put differently, what is the degree of our engagement with ableist poetry and other writing’s norms, and what’s to be done about this pattern? No one is innocent. The collective of cyborg detectives obviously includes Weise, but also the writers invoked within her book, and all of Weise’s and the other writers’ readers, having been called in. In “On Closed Systems,” Weise writes:
And I swore I wasn’t
going to teach you anything
when I started this poem.
I want this poem to be
for us for cyborgs b/c
all the other poems from
all the other centuries
are for you.
Addressing poets as wide-ranging aesthetically and temporally as William Carlos Williams and Marie Howe, Weise’s “Catullus Tells Me Not to Write the Rant Against Maggie Smith’s ‘Good Bones’” is a vivid assertion about Cyborg Detective’s premises—and many of the poets and other writers invoked throughout Weise’s new volume. In “Catullus…”, hundreds of poets and their readers/addressees and we (as Cyborg Detective’s readers/addressees) are advised:
That poem is boring. It’s the same poem
ya’ll been writing in your centuries. Someone
gets sad, buys a house, has children, politics
and little birdies. Throw some ableism
in and publish it. Here’s a poem for you.
Ignatius had a beard and I fucked him.
Being spiritedly unapologetic is among Weise’s central approaches, as in “Biohack Manifesto”’s paradoxical closing line: “Role of disabled artist: Always be sorry.” Here and throughout Cyborg Detective, readers are advised strongly to adopt an attitude that is frequently at odds with the current state of affairs across much of the globe. Ableism, as infuriating as it is commonplace, is far too often taken for granted, or, if remembered at all, is last on a list of priorities, even among the marginalized. Weise offers a counter-argument: Disabled artist: Don’t be sorry; that’s not your role (on the contrary).
While Weise uses myriad expletives, and the words rant and attack, it would be a big mistake (and a sad reductionist one, at that) to imagine this entire book as solely a manifesto. Devotion and love are among the unforgettable (and revolutionary) themes in Cyborg Detective. “Cathedral by Raymond Carver,” at turns a tirade, and partly a love scene, includes the lines:
Of course I love him, we grew up together
so I thought we’d grow closer. I thought
I wouldn’t be able to tell me from him
but I can definitely tell me from him
though I can’t tell him. I don’t know when
it happened. I don’t know how you can grow
apart from someone when they’re right under
your nose and grow closer to someone when
they’re three thousand miles away.
Another loving, sensual example lies in Weise’s communication with and about Emily Dickinson—nearly a polar opposite of her responses to William Carlos Williams and Marie Howe. In “Variation on the Disabled Poet – Emily Dickinson #745,” Weise writes:
I’m not sure what happened
in the room with the view
except I took to you
in a new way. Please wait.
I’m not finished. Let me be—
what’s your word—foolish.
The second half of this poem turns introspective and nearly maudlin, and one wonders if endless Emily’s addressee (Weise? You, fellow reader/poet/crip/all/other?) is being asked to move on, because how could one who is disabled and shored up in that room really deserve let alone experience love? Dickinson’s persona is seemingly at-the-ready for her next disappointments and abandonments, perhaps anticipating an assumed return to isolation and loneliness. Or, maybe she (Dickinson? Weise? You?) is done focused on the impossible, and instead aims at summoning interdependence with the only reliable partner she has—a lower-case god—as the poem continues and concludes:
Now bring in the nay.
You never intended.
Never meant it. Besides
we have good god
good lives without each other.
“I’m not finished” implies a refusal to be interrupted. This assertion also comments, among other things, on a presumed incompleteness as perceived all too frequently by the non-disabled about the disabled.
There are few if any monoliths of meaning or usage in Weise’s writing. Appearing earlier in the book than the Dickinson poem (which seems to employ lower-case god as a fraught noun), Weise/Weise’s narrator in “On Closed Systems” invokes lower-case god as a transitive verb. The poem’s protagonist addresses the long histories of non-disabled people’s frequent misunderstandings of and judgments about disabled family members, friends, lovers, and clients/patients’ embodiments, lived experiences, preferences, needs, rights, and identities. This god is referenced by “the men…in my sleep” in the poem’s closing stanza:
Don’t you like it.
Don’t you like it.
Don’t you laud us.
Don’t you god us.
The poem’s narrator has just noted, “On the drive home / I realize, they like it. / The tech of it. / The money of it.” Weise’s/the narrator’s disability and its accompanying “tech” are romanticized, misunderstood, and objectified by these “strange men,” who, prior to appearing in dreams, had been “standing around me / in the doctor’s office.” Earlier in this section of the poem, “one of” those strange men “says”: “Don’t you like it?” The narrator’s response (whether directly to that man, introspectively, or just to readers—perhaps a combination) is: “Hell, it hurts.” Having had “enough,” the narrator thereafter presents “a speech,” after which the strange men “are silent.”
Being under scrutiny and enduring a kind of medical objectification that is simultaneously eroticized and intrusive are underscored here as everyday experiences, particularly for disabled people (including—especially—those who are not men) examined by medical practitioners (who are often men). The men named as “strange” implies a double-meaning of stranger/outsider and strange as in odd or peculiar. In the poem, presumably non-disabled men are the strange/unknown, not the presumably disabled person, who nevertheless remains the subject of an interrogation. Weise partly inverts the roles of outsider and insider.
Although a question mark is used in the stanza’s awake beginning—a strange man “says,” not asks, “Don’t you like it?”—the absence of question marks in the poem’s closing dreamscape also suggests that “the men” present “in my sleep” are making statements, not asking questions. The four repetitions act as a sequence of double-edged, confusing commands, as in: don’t you [dare] like it, laud us, or god us, and of course you like it, laud us, and likely think us god-like. The strange men’s fantasies, along with their power and control, intercept the created dreamscape. No one should have to live with this sort of threat (or abuse), but many of us do, Weise’s poem asserts. The poet interrupts a nightmare; its effects have consequences deserving rapt attention and requiring redress.
In the examples above, calling out and calling in occur quite differently than in “Attack List,” a poem that begins in Cyborg Detective and continues on Twitter. The ongoing “Attack List” is an ever-emerging, collaborative poem. At the time of this review’s writing, the Twitter feed had over 3,800 tweets and replies. The poem’s “aliveness” is replete with disturbing ironies, as the poem’s subject is the epidemic level of violence toward—including the murders of—disabled women, and how this horror is “covered” by the mainstream media. As the Twitter site explains, “Poem as database (2014-present). Nexis Uni, Google News, Crip Hexameter. Am borg not bot. #DisabledCommons = file avail to dis ppl only.”
Each copy of Cyborg Detective includes a line from “Attack Poem” printed in bold white letters on a black piece of card-stock the size of a business card with Braille embossing of the same line. The card also reads: “Line from a poem called ‘Attack List.’ The poem begins in the book Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions) and continues on Twitter. https://twitter.com/AttackList.” (My card says: “Mouth, nose of disabled patient was taped.”)
“Nondisabled Demands” underscores how frequently disabled people are expected to come out as disabled in order to prove our inherent value, and interpersonal as well as social worthiness. This act of proving likewise lends legitimacy to non-disabled people, who have primacy in an ableist world, and who in turn infamously imagine living with a disability as inspiring (as if a significant purpose of living as a disabled person is to impress those without disabilities). Weise effectively coalesces this ableist norm with predispositions toward nationalism, masculine gender identity, and accompanying heteronormative expectations—without using any of the (arguably exclusionary and “academic”-y) words that I just used. Perhaps it is Tipsy Tullivan, Weise’s YouTube persona, who says in “Nondisabled Demands,”
You can’t expect people to read you
If you don’t come out and say it.
Everyone knows the default mode
of a poem is ten fingers, ten toes,
in love with women and this nation.
When this is not true, it is incumbent
on you to come out and say it
It is far more likely that “Nondisabled Demands”’s addresser/narrator is not Tullivan, Weise’s anti-doppelgänger, but Weise. By fashioning a set of demands arising from non-disabled straw men, Weise engages directly with her fellow disabled community members. Communicating “as if” (or, playing at being) non-disabled, she tells us, between the lines: I’ve had enough, and I know that you have, too. Given how many non-disabled people put on “disability drag,” this poem’s serious game-playing joins Dr. Martin Rochlin’s “The Heterosexual Questionnaire” (1972) and several of Weise’s own poems (“On Closed Systems” among them, as noted), upending the status quo creatively by taking aim at and reversing power dynamics.
Fellow disabled poets, Weise says, are haunted—at least potentially—by our predecessors, the now-dead poets whose disablement was often described by them indirectly. In Cyborg Detective’s first piece, “Poem, Conveyed,” Weise summons and is summoned by Alexander Pope:
He does not speak, directly,
in the poems about it.
Pope, you could say,
conveys scoliosis
in heroic couplet,
sleight of hand, anything
to escape his body.
And now that he is bodyless,
he speaks through us.
The solemnity of this interlocutory haunting, and its implications for an ethics of cross-generational creative work, are met with yet another “sleight of hand,” as Weise shows us, from the outset, that this poetry collection will link continuously macabre matters with techniques both humorous and dead serious. Cyborg Detective expects its committed readers to join Weise in strategizing against erasure, critiquing norms by honing in on both insiders and outsiders, and doing so without being too “heavy handed”…for that would be insensitively idiomatic.
Title: Cyborg Detective
Author: Jillian Weise
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication Date: 2019
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener’s first full-length poetry collection, The Golem Verses, was published in 2018 by Nine Mile Press. Her poetry appears in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere; it is forthcoming in the Welcome to the Resistance anthology. Diane’s flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; her creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Stone Canoe. After serving as Guest Editor for Nine Mile’s Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics, Diane was appointed Assistant Editor for the magazine. She is a Research Professor and Associate Director of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach at Syracuse University’s Burton Blatt Institute (College of Law). Diane also teaches in the Renée Crown University Honors program at S.U. She has published widely on disability, pedagogy, and empowerment, among other subjects. Visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com/. Diane is the Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering.