In contemporary American poetry, disability poetry has gained substantial popularity and societal influence on par with other forms of poetry, arguing against injustices based on race, ethnicity, class, or gender. In a society where identity politics rule and varied communities are divided based on gender, race, ethnicity, and religion, handicapped poets generally observe that poetry was and has been a potent medium for articulating their agonizing experiences and their grief of their crippled bodies. This paper, therefore, seeks to highlight the pervasiveness of disability representation in contemporary American poetry by taking Jilian Weise as an example to highlight the poetical richness of the often marginalized poetic genre. The paper adopts a theoretical framework as propounded by combining feminism and disability components to scrutinize gender inequality, biased treatment of disabled people, and beauty’s double standards. Weise has written disability poetry combined with a feminist attitude to reclaim stolen disabled bodies from non-disabled ones. She is seen as resisting the sense of ableism in communities where they see the idea of beauty as embodied in their normalcy and beautiful bodies. By investigating Jillian Weise’s poetry on disability selected from different collections, namely, Amputate Guide to Sex (Weise, 2007), the Book of Goodbyes (Weise, 2013), and Cyborg Detective (Weise, 2019), the paper first advances the argument that disability is a social and cultural enforcement rather than physical impairment. Secondly, it is concluded that disability is presented both as the primary goal and a means to subvert the conventional notions of beauty, sexuality, and normalcy across the American community. 

Keywords: ableism; crip poetry; disability; Jillian Weise; normalcy

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