Pills and Jacksonvilles: Poems

A fierce, provocative collection of queer poetry 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, this work of disability poetry blurs 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 confessional poetry lays bare her most intimate self—pulling back the curtain on the loves, losses, and obsessions of a life.

• Cyborg Identity: Explore the space between human and machine as the author reclaims the term “cyborg” to celebrate disabled culture and history.
• Experimental Poetry: Discover formally exciting poems that weave through DMs, texts, and video chats, blurring the line between flesh and technology.
• Unflinching Queer Desire: A bold and sexy look at desire, navigating the intersection of queerness and disability in diners, bars, and dark living rooms.
• Provocative Cultural Commentary: Challenge your preconceptions on everything from opiate use to BDSM in a collection that is both lyrical and sharply observant.

"Jillian Weise is a genius of our time. The poems in Pills and Jacksonvilles are incisive and impious and anguished and indicting; they are blunt, they are coy, they are ruthless. Weise writes against the insidious normativity and ableism that permeates the literary world (and beyond) and toward a future that is wild and wide. And if that's not enough, this book does perhaps the most important thing that can be done in poetry (and beyond): it has a party at the end. There should always be a party at the end."

“Most people can’t imagine the shit that Jillian Weise has to endure every day. Fortunately for us, she has kept her wits about her. She has a brilliant take on corners of reality that ableists overlook.”  - Ishmael Reed, author of The Shine Challenge, 2024