Juliet Cook and j/j hastain have collaborated on a macabre series of poems that dissect the body and leave the reader stunned. These poems explore the physical displacement of the femine through the cultural displacement of horror and the grotesque.

A Red Witch, Every Which Way

Literature & Fiction

hastain, j/j

Cook, Juliet

Poetry

Hysterical Books

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "At once reckless, eccentric and graceful, j/j hastain's newest collection creates a poetics of overflow that interrogates the very nature of form, 'filling the filigree/with embodied/flicker/all of the parts of our flesh-compass.' In myrhh to re all myth, the poet innovates a fluidity that nurtures form 'as gap to invert/while we so ravenously/invent.' Rather than the brittle stasis of conventional poetry, this supple work rises to the level of jubilant defiance. Attending to our 'human askew' in a manner that is both empathic and challenging, hastain enacts dynamic swerves: this book generates an eros and intimacy that have social, spiritual and 'a truly galactic activism.'"—Elizabeth Robinson"'This is a romance of fractals,' an invigorating linguistic panoply which refuses to be any one thing. myrhh to re all myth gives us a vivid transdifferentiated poethic state—a sonic inquiry—thus feral post-gendered embodiment of 'the infinitely ferric dress.' Multiple, layered, disarming and hauntingly worthwhile, hastain spins a fine vocalic lyric gossamer about us, a future ethos and new grammatical treatise of fracture, rediscovery, and retelling, a myrhh re(garding) all myth."—Susana Gardner"MYRRH TO RE ALL MYTH is a vast consortium of direct transmissions from the brain stem, the limbic system, the neocortex and the ecosystem—these transmissions are then transduced by intensive language decoding the flows. hastain presents a sensual wardrobe of aternal, untimely and actual meanings that give a perlocutionary effect of incredible wonder. I'm entranced by this book."—Brenda Iijima

myrrh to re all myth

Furniture Press Books

At the very beginning of cadences, j/j hastain announces that rather than the conventional model of opposing artifice to the body and the natural, artifice will very much interact with the body, the “pungent colony.” That is not to say that it’s a peaceful relation. In the very same first poem, hastain demands that the reader/lover burn their body when they die, except for the genitals and mouth, which we are to give to other lovers, like both works of art and art’s mediums. Violence against the body is a persistent motif in this collection; violence pierces and punctures the body, but not for the sake of damaging it, as much as to open it up to a “trans” state, a “spasming” aesthetic space where “black sand and pearls” are “being poured into one another.” The book takes us into an increasingly (wonderfully) Elizabethan idea of poetry: “I once covered you with dried rose heads and strips of words.” The spasming “tryst”, the art of these poems spasms back and forth in time as well as gender and love: “oh luminous anarchies!” Johannes Gorranson Words that have never been next to each other are next to each other now, lines that gut, a swarm of pink moths on your eyeskin. This book is a garden of “blood blooms” that will stop your breath. When hastain writes “We must create different versions of us to sound out the wounds on,” you’ll do so willingly. cadences is a dissection of love and space and sex that will teach you the new gender-language while pulling your chest open. Sarah Rose Etter “Making the body as the body is making”—this is the major project of cadences. Body transitivity is an ever-shifting locus in this work of thrilling prosody. Body ideation as “we eroticize our own gists”: body iterations, body play, body enthralling and body motility. The outcome is endless, there is no culmination. j/j’s work places the participant in a biome where revelatory becoming is a forever. Brenda Iijima Cadences, j/j hastain’s mesmerizing and daring new book, sings of the struggle to be visibly indecipherable yet decidedly human, on the move, metaphorical, “in transit,” or “as transits.” Human bodies move and are moved, contra static attempts at pronunciation or assignment, contra binarisms and racializations, against these processes which might end up the only categorically binding constant that can form us into a “we” in the first place. Across, underneath, away from and through existing social constraint groans, gurgles, and other timbres and tonalities are stuttering forth. Does the song of acknowledging the multifoliate human form of cadences’ lovers—their embodied and nurtured variousness and multiplicity—come with them from the “new eden” that grew around their love? How do we exist in a world outside normative signs of value? Can we make such a world at all past these importantly complex pages? In opening this vulnerable, human, desiring book of sacred song we are invited to find out. Invited to do so as an act of struggle, as experiment in sound and embodiment, as a “sojourn” with the real and urgent stakes of lives that love under siege, as a ritual archeology of the residue of bodies that question, want, and need—together. With its energetic activisms and with all its refusals-as-prosodic movements towards insurrection—with that “I” “saying a bell that groans instead of rings”—here, at cadences, is where future social-economic histories have room to imply themselves. Here is where the subaltern engagements of our species, multiple loves and entanglements, multiple ((de)gendered) forms moving across the furniture of the press, multiple and usually unacknowledged or oppressed ways of being in the world turn visible as having been performed. David Wolach

cadences: cultivating cadences to invert the given creed

Triton Books

Poetry. LGBT Studies. THE RELATIONAL ELATIONS OF ORPHANED ALGEBRA is a ground-breaking collaboration of poems and poetics essays. "Began" by Eileen R. Tabios who crafted poems melding algebra and orphans, this unique project was "finished" by j/j hastain who echoed the poems first musically and then by way of meditations on Trans identity(ies). The collaboration presents several text approaches including essays addressing Tabios' international adoption experience and hastain's suggestion for more natural and less violent pronouns that transcend gender binaries."Categories are not abstractions, they are bodies. Family is one such embodied category, gender another. What happens to bodies when they don't fit the categories assigned them, when they lack families, when they criss-cross gender or genre lines? How can one calculate such change, compose equations to explain these trans-categorical shifts? Our very pronouns are at stake, as are nations, blood-ties, definitions to words like 'dad' and 'belonging.' As j/j hastain writes, 'There is a new lineage that we are trying to make more apparent.' Tabios and hastain are trans-parents to a fresh embodiment of words and bodies, and to what they mean when they come together as books and persons. Their writing counts the change(s) in unexpected vocabularies."―Susan M. Schultz

the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA

Tabios, Eileen R.

Marsh Hawk Press

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&mdash;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."&mdash;Joyelle McSweeney

Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology

Black Radish Books

“The first time I read j/j hastains' “her,” my response was the word ”Gloria.” I then put the book of poems away to think about why this word had been my reaction.  It came to me that this long poem is really a ground breaking spiritual manifesto based on the reactions of a female body’s childhood sexual experience and ends in the transformative power of poetry to evolve sex to what is sublime--beyond gender, yet embodied in the “her-ness” that is peeled away, petal by petal, as the tulips in the poem. Not only is this ground breaking in the philosophical, spiritual, sense but also notably in j/j’s poetical form.  j/j’s words are chosen unerringly to be links to the nurturing,  sensual and creative aspects; j/j’s spaces command attention to the whole of word and space until a luminous anamorphic beauty looms at once dominant and fragile.”  Carole Towers

Lummox Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. LGBT Studies. "What happens when two brilliant and sensitive minds unfettered by conventional categories brave the inter-and intra-personal depths of humanity and engage one another&mdash;and all of us&mdash;in the generative dance of definition via a monumental, no-holds- barred cornucopia of all things sensual, experiential, spiritual, and imaginable? This does. And you won't want to miss it."&mdash;Susan Lewis "TONGUE A QUEER ANOMALY is a Samuel Johnson's dictionary&mdash;if Samuel Johnson had absorbed Foucault, Jeannette Winterson and Johnny Rotten&mdash;for the chaotic, universally catastrophic, collapsing, latter day, ruinous, emerging world. The language in this post-post-post lyrical and gently violent piece of irreverence and linguistic revolution by j/j hastain and t thilleman is a radical, lovely, lush, painful reinvention of language word by word, image by image, concept by concept. This is a dictionary for the new body, the new sexuality, the new collective, the new wrecked, fragmented Homo Sapiens, for the new damaged world."&mdash;Sam Witt

Tongue A Queer Anomaly: The Glossary

Thilleman, T

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Priest/ess is the name the poet j/j hastain uses in an ongoing series of notebooks. These notebooks, that I have had the opportunity to read, contain meditations upon time spent at a cave in worship to Gaia... t thilleman, from the Preface

Priest/ess: a Memoir of the Ulterior

Literary

Priest/ess is part memoir, part anti-memoir, part somatic map, part queer rant, part aura correction, part cathartic scroll, part eco-erotics, part self-imposed violence (re what is not preferable in my psyche (a process like dead heading roses)), part gender pus and gender opus toward psychosomatic and telepathic opulence, part necromancy, part quantum turbulence, part sex magic/intimacies with my lover, part sex magic/intimacies with Unseen Beings, part queer aphrodisiac, part animation of goddesses (forced and reactive), part confessional bridging, part poetics as mergers and part schisms for emancipation.

Priest/ess 23: G_d is SHIM

Priest/ess 24: Panoply Cock

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