Written during the advent of hormone therapy and gender transition, Chelate by Jay Besemer explores the journey towards a new embodiment, one that is immediately complicated by the difficult news of a debilitating illness. This engaging chronicle speaks powerfully and poetically to the experience of inhabiting a toxic body, and the ruptures in consciousness and language that arise when confronted by a stark imperative, and choosing to live, and to change. The book moves intermittently from exile and alienation to hopeful anticipation, played out in short bursts of imaginative dreamwork, where desires eventually give way to their realities, as the self begins mapping the permutations of its momentous shift. What begins in uncertainty and commitment ends in self-recognition, and more uncertainty, but now in a necessary space unified by will, love, action, process, and documentation.

Chelate

Literature & Fiction

Besemer, Jay

Poetry

Brooklyn Arts Press

Jay Besemer’s Crybaby City masterly weaves the richness of speculative mimesis with the associative will of poetry to form and disperse. Concerned with both connections and dislodging, this book generates radiant disturbances where animals, the economy and languages exchange the unfolding data of a restless world. Hugo García Manríquez, author of Anti-Humboldt

Crybaby City

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Composed using words chosen from children's early to mid 20th-century readers and from early 20th-century natural history textbooks, Men & Sleep exposes hidden currents and meanings in teaching materials from the past. The two long poems presented in this volume draw readers into a strange yet quotidian world of ordinary wonder and transformation. Inhabiting creaturely life & plant/animal co-embodiment--queering sexual, gender & even species distinctions--this book invites readers to mix (in) their own evanescent experiences. Moving beyond the limits of linear narrative or cause and effect, Men & Sleep requests and makes space for repeated engagements, just as if readers were exploring a forest or a marsh. When it's never quite clear whether the being you encounter here is a human, a tree, an insect or some unique combination of all of these, how do you behave? How does their behavior impact you? How do you both change in the encounter? Perhaps these questions will help Men & Sleep reveal itself to you. "Can poetry be both mysterious and physical? I am utterly intrigued by Jay Besemer's Men & Sleep. It is an immersive book that hums with the sensuality of "spore-filled organs" as it meditates on the relationship between language, masculinity and nature. While it is a book of trees, it's also a decidedly horizontal book: we creep through the mosses and leaves, smelling the 'puzzling odor.'"--Johannes G^ransson "When I see a tree I think "Trees enjoy being trees." Or maybe it's more accurate to say I feel them; their commitment to the vitality of struggle and survival as enjoyment and pleasure. As I was reading this collection I thought, Jay Besemer understands what I mean by this, even though we've never met or had a conversation. Human beings are also this way, like trees, or are we trees? The word "like" here doesn't feel quite right, to designate separateness. In "the sexual autumn" we respond to change entangled with the earth beings we've othered through language. Poetry brings us back home to where we belong."--Nikki Wallschlaeger Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.

Men & Sleep

Meekling Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Besemer, Jay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Besemer, Jay

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Besemer, Jay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Chelate

Crybaby City

Men & Sleep