Pills and Jacksonvilles

“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.” – Natalie Shapero, author of Hard Child and Popular Longing

“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

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.