Non-Novels: The New Elementals Project

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