long past the presence of common
Poetry / LGBT Studies
87 pages
paperback (perfect bound)
6″ x 7.75″ (5.24 x 19.685 cm)
black & white on cream paper
cover price: $12
free shipping when ordered directly from SAY IT WITH STONES;
for bookstores — 60% off cover price w/ free shipping.
Interbirth Books / Say It With Stones
ISBN-13: 978-0615496696 / ISBN-10: 0615496695
LCCN: 2011931330
long past the presence of common is a revolutionary document — a collection of poetry, collage, and scripts that challenges a political stability premised on always already repressive and hypocritical social norms and practices. This work takes strategies of categorization, simplification, and reduction to task for their failure to acknowledge the fundamental instability and unpredictability of organic energy and, in the process, it unleashes a radical assault on psycho/sexual conservatism, cultural conventionality, and spiritual stasis. Like a hot wire, long past the presence of common hisses and snaps an electric pulse violent and mesmerizing; yet there’s something soft here — a skin-like porousness (subtle, erotic, and inviting) that saturates the energy, thus exposing the multidimensionality of the bodily experience: a constant inter-bodily contact and merger and mutual becoming always dynamic and fluid in its unending cosmological escalations. An urgent and necessary anarchism — at once dangerous and revitalizing — sings from these pages & the message is clear: there are ways to live, but the lives therein requires a radical re-imagining of what it means to be forever in relation to an emergent fusion. j/j hastain writes the future in its inexhaustible queerness, its variability, pulsation, and immaculate unraveling, and the vision pleth presents in this book is one of limitless luminescence and difference that cuts through established models — both micro and macro — of fixity and closure. long past the presence of common offers essential possibilities within an age of darkness.
Praise for j/j hastain’s long past the presence of common
“In words that reflect the dynamic complexities of language and human relationships, in lines cascading across pages, challenging the limitations of thinking in terms of duality and revealing an understanding beyond linguistic polarity, j/j hastain want ‘to show / the way that these languages are inherently / slanted / uncountable / yet worth lifetimes of attempt’ and does just that. Like tongues coming together in the primal quest for contact, hastain’s poetry is the experience of connecting, of breaking fabricated boundaries and going to the source — an essential voice for humanity in an increasingly isolating world.”
–Ed Go
“Full saturation ‘inverse –embedded wishes’ surface and recede in long past the presence of common, a momentous document which activates a commons for future feeling. This book radicalizes conceptions of the body multiple. Erotic subjects in the form of psycho-somatic wishes surge, intensify, electrify, vacillate, flicker, morph, fume, commingle and melt. This is emancipatory writing. Note too the ecstasy of the viscous embryonic circuitry arc bubble collages which are interspersed throughout. I feel an incredible kinship with this book.”
–Brenda Iijima
“Our bodies render us travelers, or prisoners, and on this truth is born j/j hastain’s fascinating new book long past the presence of common. Naming and triangulating are important passions in this work, which often surprises with its multiple vocabularies, even as it refreshes age old debates about the systems of logic and gender that have made a nightmare of the political experience. If you are looking for a book of avant-garde poetry with a revolutionary dimension, you would do well to take this book to heart.”
–Kevin Killian
About the Author
j/j hastain is a trans-genre writer and artist. j/j chants, contorts and continues the body (which is reliquary) for the sake of inventing new shapes for proceeding — for trance-poetics — for transfixion. j/j imagines an experimental narrative (incandescent and always fluctuating) wherein consciousness and infinite futures can be investigated and felt, for the sake of radical revelation, reveries and neoteric joy as embodies politic.
[note] This title is also available at Amazon.com for $12 + shipping.