our bodies are beauty inducers is a fantastic and fantastical exploration of gender and the physical ground upon which it plays. hastain’s words explode the amorphous domain where bodies and beauty meet. Electrifying and kinetic, hastain’s work shatters and reassembles the physical into intersecting recombinant zones of meaning: the physical induces beauty in the eyes of the other and true beauty received by the other removes otherness…
“Study and ceremony: a voyage through the inner and outer rings of eros as way into the depth and intensity of what is called love. First, the orgasmic lift to primordial who-we-are-ness floor by floor, department-by-department, permeable border- by-border, then the reflective intelligence-absorption of that expansiveness reached. j/j has discovered Walt Whitman’s secret inner-body elevator and transcribes and elucidates for us its ride.” —Reed Bye author of Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems
“What ‘completes’ a body? What is the furious, stripped site ‘from which all newness is generated’? This book, formatted to soak up all the color, asks its ‘sticky’ and ‘indelible’ reader to consider/eat the relationship between fragmentation and bliss. Are you hungry? Do you want to read so hard you have ‘bite marks’ afterwards? I suspected as much. I’m a little hungry too.” —Bhanu Kapil author of Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
“j/j/[pleth’s work is the new shamanism. Each intoxicating incantation, each ritualized variation of syntax, each disparate element stitched…amounts to a dangerous spell set to stir in the readers gut. Whether for minutes, days or weeks it boils its way to the head. Beware.” —Travis Macdonald author of The O Mission Repo
“j/j hastain’s our bodies are beauty inducers offers entrance into ‘brutal anatomies,’ the ‘subtle panic’ that comes with revealing form, intimacy and the elimation of space between confession and lovers. While offering much precision and introspection into retracted distances hastain allows the page itself to breathe, become breathless, for readers to gasp at the exposure of their own fantasies ‘pinned beneath weight’ and rocked against headboards, identities gushing with texture. This text has stained my body; the nurturing inertia of hands has seduced me, has exposed the ‘fluidly episodic’ sensuality in body language.” —Joe Cooper author of Here Come the Groovies
j/j hastain’s body is like paper…like this book…an isbn’ed version of texture and constantly shifting translation. It folds and can be turned in several directions. It can be read upside down and may splinter off if pulled too hard. It begs to be pulled apart. In our bodies are beauty inducers, j/j places speakers throughout the flesh-clothed skeleton, in crevices that often get ignored, allowing a tongue and teeth to be placed sporadically in constructed mouth in order to create sound. This book is as intimate as breathing in one’s morning or fondling unhealed scars. It is a sensual and emotional portrayal of love, shifting gender and relationship of what turns one on. The space and gaps j/j constructs on each page creates a dialogue with digestion. It is a chant of the found self, due to years of searching and transcribing. We may be locked up, drawers with rusted handles, too fragile to be opened. Luckily, j/j whispers WD40 into the webbed/cracked/burnt places of the hidden gender, the hidden desire, the watered down body that craves various measures of tidal waves. We are reading the hieroglyphics beneath skin, below the moans and pressed against pulled out orgasms. This is a breakdown, breakthrough, and break-in of bodies colliding, communicating and growing new cells through slow-motioned language. —Aimee Herman
