“I wrote her to honor her (the pronoun, the ‘used to’ parts in me), to try and de-toggle something in me, to uphold a previous (yet very necessary) identity while making space in me for new pronouns, new identities. The future tense of the present houses the past in a sweet casing. I want to honor the her in me: the her in her stilettos and pencil skirts, the her who begins to become the land of the Australian outback (with dreadlocks and bare feet), the her that is less her and more something else with that shaved head and those boxers, pants sagging into a plethora of pronouns. All of these deserve honor because all of them are true: all of these are me.”
j/j hastain
“One of poetry’s most bedeviling challenges is to render the ineffable into language.The bolder poets face the difficulty of not only writing about the complex subjects but of writing about those liminal spaces in topics where language does not yet exist. j/j hastain has succeeded here as few yet have in being able to give voice to the unfolding/enfolding complexities of gender and identity.”
Eloise Klein Healy, poet & first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, CA
ISBN 978-1-929878-40-6
128 pages, 6 X 9, Trade Paperback
$15 Retail
