Jillian Weise’s newest collection, Cyborg Detective, continues her deeply literate conversation with and subversion of poets of the past and present—from highlighting the invisibility of disability in Alexander Pope’s verse in “A Poem Conveyed” to mocking popular cliché and subtle ableism in “Catullus Tells Me Not to Write the Rant Against Maggie Smith’s ‘Good Bones.’” And, of course, there’s the couplet that validated my own textual wresting during my MFA: 

Lyn Hjinian has a phantom limb.

It’s Deleluze and Guitarri’s bodies. 

These intertextual conversations in the first and second sections of the book are Weise’s opening act to her franker discussion of disability. They’re more playful than the later sections, though there is still a heaviness in the poems such as “I Want Your Fax”: “They say things about us . . . / Ableist verse, ableist verse.” Similarly, section three is an extended riff on the titular “Cathedral by Raymond Carver.” Then, after getting readers comfortable with her referential humor, Weise begins to slowly carve my heart out with a spoon in a poem dealing with euthanasia, followed by pieces concerned with stalking and gun ownership as a poet. 

“Attack List” is an absolutely crushing four-page list of headlines concerning the rape and murder of disabled women; even more concerningly, the poem is lengthening at twitter.com/AttackList. Poems like “Nondisabled Demands” ring with the frustration of a woman (poet/speaker or poet-speaker) whose work is considered “disability activism,” thanks to her amputee status, without giving her a choice in the matter. Given Weise’s love of pseudonyms, it is best to assume Weise is playing a character, though it’s perilously easy to read her work autobiographically. However, as a disabled reader who felt these stanzas deeply—this is difficult.

“Some Rights” burns with her anger at such things: 

If we write, it’s identity            

If they write, it’s Reflections                   

on American Legacy

Weise’s final five poems explore the idea of the cyborg that titles this collection. “Imaginary Interview” sets up the speaker as a cyborg with a prosthetic leg. They debate the definition/realm of “disability” with an interlocutor (moving through legal and social concepts and contexts), leading to my favorite exchange: 

Q: What is the condition?

A: I am a cyborg.

After some more back and forth, the poem ends with the cyborg speaker imploring bioethicists to grant them the ability to adjust the settings on their own leg sans superfluous doctor appointments for the same. The Poet-Speaker-Cyborg voice is further muddled by a piece “. . . in the Voice of Ray Bradbury, as channeled by the Cyborg Jillian Weise” and by the mania-edged voice of the following two poems. The book ends with a call to “Anticipatory Action,” which asks readers to consider the current, not future, existence of cyborgs. Weise notes that this is a direct response to a piece by Cathey Park Hong. 

Cyborg Detective is delightful, wrenching, and clever, and it jabs at the darker side of disability with a honed and pointed sarcasm.