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Poetry. LGBT Studies.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "j/j hastain's book A WOMB-SHAPED WORMHOLE is one beginning for a world attempting to make itself in advance of its articulation. But it can be articulated by scents, which is to say, 'traces' like musk, patchouli, mustard, 'split truffles, ' or even attar of long-dead altars and imagined memories. In this beginning lie the orgasms of fractals, revealing how fractions require flesh as condition precedent to existence for who we may not at first recognize is nonetheless not that different from you and me" Eileen R. Tabios."

A work of rich clear sensual language, of "thermal tremble and juice," these poems and photos pull the weaver's threads together, bring focus to "wherein we can be a root to the sea." Sinewy lines are constantly "quoting my biology back to me as vow" and display a "multi-creative musculature" we desperately need and desire. j/j is the real deal, reclaiming a space for engendered anarchy, opening Pandora's secret treasure trove, playing with fire, sound and love. Anne Waldman Here the elemental ground opens as j/j hastain creates multiple sacred sites, the body as it enlarges and contracts, the meaning as it moves in and out of absence and presence, consciousnesses and its negation: these shrines. Here the text is planted in the image, the life is planted in the book, what of life trembles and transforms as it tries again and again to open into writing. A beautiful and complex anti-memoir, dear weaver of disparates, connects the reader to a yet to be named source "wherein we were a root to the sea". Melissa Buzzeo

guttural silk make new gong is a new chapbook of poems and photographic "poem-cells" by acclaimed Trans author j/j hastain. It includes seventeen intricate textual poems and four visual pieces on the subject of sex and love, approached transcendentally and transformationally. It includes an Afterword by Jonathan Penton. The e-book is free.

Poetry. j/j hastain's work, Systems of Steaming Cleave, re-conceives the body, intimacy, death, and the sublime. If we follow hastain's dead lovers as they swim and fly in some "autonomous portion of the sea," what we find is a dissolution of binaries, an almost maniacal drive toward one another, an utter demolition of separateness itself. "A neoteric conversion. A new way to merge." There is something terrifying about all of that melding. I feel as though I'm drowning in mangroves. It is a synesthete's playground. The text as body. The body as music. "Trying to make even the contiguous foliage audible." Impossibly beautiful and, as V.S.Ramachandran says about the synesthetic gene, "an evolutionary tactic with an agenda." hastain's lovers are "making the centers countless." "Because eventually I would be a we, and we would be sewn more and more tightly together as we made new decencies." It is both Rumi and C.D. Wright. Luminous, elliptical, and politically destabilizing. The bodies here are trans bodies though this may have nothing at all to do with historicized gender, "our genders are our subjectivities," but rather that the trans body is one of forever moving across, forever moving through. This is exactly the kind of thinking, writing I love. The kind of vision I need.—tc tolbert A rogue philosophical deconstructing of ultimate consummation. Abstracted language details fascination in this meditation on sensuality where self destabilizes to deify the beloved "as an indelible site of union." In these pages j/j hastain has constructed a vivid, Sapphic exploration of the self.—Maureen Owen In Steaming Cleave j/j hastain reminds us that "starlight is not a line but a blended length." The world the poet here creates is likewise what is shared between bodies, between bodies and the full liquid world around them, and what death shares with us. You will find herein a sensation akin to H.D.'s oceanic womb-mind, where every part of living and dying pulses toward enlightenment.—Eleni Sikelianos

"Sex lost its teeth when it became an abstraction, but in 'cock-burn', j/j hastain remembers that fucking has always been and will always be revolutionary. Teeth and all other parts. Here is a map in 1:1 scale, without gloss or euphemism. The oracle in the temple of the body speaks from the shadows, long absent. The news is good"--publisher's web site, viewed on March 19, 2014.

Poetry. "j/j hastain's Luci is the most seductive devil I've met in some time. A queer devil, she must learn to know her cursed body in all its mercurial forms as black hole, cave lip, letter, fatty winged-thing, beauty, ravisher, mass of genres, thirsts, and images. In investigating the medium of her own body, she becomes mediumistic to the bodies of others, and most fatally drawn to that impossible bit of clay: the human. hastain dresses and undresses Luci's body in a garment of prose as fluid and fulgurating as Luci herself. This is a smoking, lucid book, a vermilion and quicksilver book." Joyelle McSweeney"