Apophallation Sketches by j/j hastain

I’m lucky; I’ve been reading the prolific, which is to say generous, j/j hastain for years. This new work of myths realizes the kind of radically inclusive ethos (here there are bees, ritual sex, mothers and other genderqueers, microbes, Venus of Willendorf, “accidentals in music,” “the taste of a round thing’s edge,” and “real monks who wear both real and faux mink” not only in conversation but in a collective act of meaning-making) that makes goddesses and lesser gods, humans and arthropods, activists and earth-lovers, beasts and silence sing. Here we can be alive. All of us. Every pronoun we’ve never known how to say. “Being commanded by an imaginary figure from inside of you, they agree: is insanity.” And yet j/j knows that this is what the myth making/narrative impulse is—the “imaginary figure inside.” And we have never been so beautiful in our insane.

—TC Tolbert

An unapologetically positive anti-novel, a host of personae, of challenges: Lovers; travelers; Michael Jackson; families; queer bodies; genders of flux; green algae; water; floods; horses; the corpse flower; befuddled cops; massage therapy; therapists; ritual; shamans; blood; caves; pasture; mannequins; drowning clowns; myth; people; transformation. “Whether or not you know it, your relationship to words has always been an erotic one.” So know it.

—Jay Besemer

In this anti-novel j/j hastain performs on words and ideas the very miracles that Nature bestows on certain hermaphroditic land slugs. As suggested by j/j’s title, large conceptual penises spiral round one another, exchanging post-sensical semen, winding ever more ecstatically tighter as the un-paragraphs proceed, until, with the serrated edge of hastain’s wit and erudition, the genitive members must be chewed off, and the entities proceed to feminized fruition. A gratifying experience all around!

—Tom Bradley

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j, simply, hopes to make the God/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon.

j/j hastain is the inventor of The Mystical Sentence Projects and author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), The Non-Novels (Spuyten Duyvil), Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology (Black Radish Books) and The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance of Experimental Realisms. j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin, Aufgabe, and Tarpaulin Sky.

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Apophallation Sketches
by j/j hastain
$19.95, paperback, 220pp
ISBN-13: 978-1-941196-18-2

Apophallation Sketches by j/j hastain

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