GENRE: Lesbian • Poetry • Transgender
LENGTH: 110 pages
RATING:

it matters to me that you are a woman
because you define yourself as a woman

This collection by poet j/j hastain is a personal journey through gender. Sometimes sensual, sometimes erotic, these poems resonate with love in all its forms, melding together society's preconceived notions of "straight" or "gay" or "lesbian," "male" or "female," "top" or "bottom," "masculine" or "feminine" to create a genderqueer landscape where the lines blur and the labels no longer stick. we in my Trans is at its heart a series of love poems concerning what of sensation, exists between -- whether by way of the rolling folds of desire or in overlaps with a lover. These are poems that embrace one's self as much as another.

j/j defines as Trans/genderqueer, which is different than Transgender, though not at all discounting it. j/j is interested in identity construction via active documents -- utilizing methods that are not at all related to previously determined models (with binary derived bases). j/j's work involves embodying, inhabiting, and populating the body as one would a neoteric space -- through ways and methods that are not related to formerly prescribed shapes that are based in limit.

"I had forgotten my own throat. Then I started reading the work of j/j hastain. Whatever your alliance with order, you will burn it for how you will whimper in j/j's writing. Trans as ka­leidoscope. 'how the pronoun was a lock ... a blockade.' I have read no one else whose words are so entirely without skin. Every line without shelter. Every line without line. There isn't a single deceit. Ever. j/j's work leaves me wordless. Always. j/j is the only writer who writes me into wordlessness. My bones have been searching for themselves since j/j's last line." -- Andrea Gibson, poet and activitist

EXCERPT:
Note: may contain sexually explicit scenes of a homoerotic nature.

enacting syllables
we           merge

tableaux


both piqued and piquant

foaming


with ergonomic     cock

how we make

     cock-burn       a place

     a pace

                  a poem

* * * *

it really is like this

as metal turns into liquid


as her burgeoning
poppy


enters my dilating
coven

* * * *

it matters to me that you are a woman
because you define yourself as a woman

“I am your mistress
you are my bitch”

configuring
and resonant with heaps


both the physiology and the hearth of this
shape in shape fulfillment


you pull my parts out of their covering


like pulling taffy and dna strands from

a great and pullulating

primal

cascade

* * * *

‘my body is yours          mistress
yours to do with as you please’

all anthem here     as the chant renders

you grab me from behind
critical and marvelous

slightly
stinging

slough
and leaning

toward slake

* * * *

I feel my nipples being born

through this conglomerate                           tearing

and demand

I squeeze your cock
you force my head down

enter me again from behind

fuck me                       firm


“you’re gonna take it doggy style”

‘ahhh               ohhh my goooooddddd’

“shhh               shut up and take it”


and I bite my own arms

as a vampiral way to keep the sound

internal