Out from Otoliths — j/j hastain's the ulterior eden

the ulterior eden
j/j hastain
56 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-0-9
$11.75 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-ulterior-eden/14953436

the ulterior eden presents us with a contemporary Song of Songs in which allegory is subverted by eros into a more explicit and boldly unconventional passion. Large with life and ecstatic with the “names and innumerable sensations” of adoration, this communion joins beloved and beloved in the erotic chaos of a “newest pronoun.” j/j hastain makes this pact of bounty both politically and spiritually charged, shaping poetry’s intimacies as a means through which we can “mature all historical/grief/ into luminosity. —Elizabeth Robinson

j/j hastain’s poems thrust through language's own limits, opening it, re-making it to carry ideas it could not otherwise accommodate, “like a neoteric intimacy all pluck-penitent”, “the dispositions we intone rather than recant.” Short-circuiting erasure, j/j’s verbo-visual texts create a space for embodied being which transcends binaries, oppositions, proffers instead the gap into which we must leap. hastain reimagines the possibles in an ecstasy of sound/sounding and meditation, “a thing overflowing with curvature truths and tugs… an inter-ethereal design that renders its subjects submerged” in a new real. These erotic, potent, spiritual poems cast us in between, inside, loose but never aloof, as we enter into an evolutionary dialogos. A discourse through wilderness into a new wild. A birth, a dream, a text of being, hastain’s poems and image-poems “midwife” a new body, lover-and-beloved, “feral heart” beating against our ribcage, “a newest pronoun” exploding on the page. —Marthe Reed

The full catalog of Otoliths books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront