her
Author: j/j hastain
Genre: Poetry, Trade Paper, 6 X 9
Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)
www.lummoxpress.com
ISBN: 978-1-929878-40-6-0
Pages:128
Publishing Date: April 2013
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To speak to why I wrote her is to need to go way back. I used to be a little girl. I used to dream of finding a man (to marry) who was just like my daddy. I used to play the violin and haul red wagons full of vegetables down the street from the neighbor’s house to mine. I used to beg the night for relief from the day. How does a ‘used to’ become a current relevancy?
I wrote her to honor her (the pronoun, the ‘used to’ parts in me), to try and de-toggle something in me, to uphold a previous (yet very necessary) identity while making space in me for new pronouns, new identities. The future tense of the present houses the past in a sweet casing. I want to honor the her in me: the her in her stilettos and pencil skirts, the her who begins to become the land of the Australian outback (with dreadlocks and bare feet), the her that is less her and more something else with that shaved head and those boxers, pants sagging into a plethora of pronouns. All of these deserve honor because all of them are true: all of these are me.
j/j hastain
BIO:
j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin, Aufgabe and Tarpaulin Sky. j/j has been a guest lecturer at Naropa University, University of Colorado and University of Denver.
COMMENTS
j/j hastain transcends experiment poetry, transcends experimental words and concepts, and transcends beyond sexual identity into transference into something more. j/j writes for the voiceless, giving them a voice, finding “the courage to enter/ the next body”. There are many posers out there pretending to be outrageous; j/j is the real deal. j/j explores identity and wow, does it matter! It matters when identity gets blurred in the world, where so many do not know who they are, and sex and gender are easy to unintentionally slip out of, like undressing skin. As j/j says, “what imprisons is the idea/ of space” and j/j is a poet obsessed with space and line breaks. For what breaks us more than the negative space around us; or, the space of silence?
Martin Willitts Jr
One of poetry's most bedeviling challenges
is to render the ineffable into language. The bolder poets face the difficulty
of not only writing about complex subjects but of writing about those liminal
spaces in topics where language does not yet exist. j/j hastain has succeeded
here as few yet have in being able to give voice to the unfolding/enfolding
complexities of gender and identity. The poems in her stretch from a purely
lyrical explication of a personal situation to the breathless urgency of an
unfolding manifesto. I am reminded in this work of the powerful and shocking
music of Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres. Although hastain's aims are large,
they do not go unfulfilled. This is a book that should serve as a baseline for
poetry that attempts to bridge identity's great divides.
Eloise Klein Healy
SAMPLES
looking into rogue
aspects
for unforeseen
nutrients
for courage to enter
the next body
oh inversions
odes and letters
amidst so many
instances of isolated
I choose to proceed
from within
after having finally learned to fray
pink
byways and bisections
when I was a child the neighbor boy held
my head there and forced me to lick
but more shocking than that
was the way my father
turned his head to avoid
what was he afraid he might see?
later that day
I slipped under the yellow
booth
both
hiding and hidden from
which to me was one of the first
meanings
of and for
alone
baptism was required
in order for me to ever become
woman
woman
which would mean a hurting
unless I broke the name
and the category
woman
which would mean Anne Sexton’s
sorrow
the decaying birds of paradise
on the chipped armoire
woman
which would mean
always limited
soma
and so many core colors
lost to
patriarchal
disguises
as I developed
I felt
like a reoccurring dream
that night I was babysitting my brother
and I could feel
someone watching me
through the white framed window
why were there no blinds or curtains?
I wished then
on blue giant stars
tried to deepen
to turn invisibility into
something more safe
I clung
desperately to a fork
because the knives were all dirty
I gripped
fiercely
in the only place in the house
that could not be viewed by
an open frame
I hoped then
I hoped for
a hero
and I did so by way of
the image
of multiple
hybrid-wolves
whorled together
a conglomerate
is always
a ringlet