asymptotic lover//thermodynamic vents by Julia Hastain aka j/j hastain is an invitation, a seduction, a collection of portals and pathways into worlds filled with languages and spells and tongue tactility. Prepare to be a voyeur, prepare to have your heart broken, prepare to leave all sense of linear time behind, prepare to be changed. The cadences of j/j hastain's words become like mantra, or a train ride through mysterious geography. This poetry is ritual force imbued with its own vigorous need. Touch your hands here, feast your eyes, travel, desire, enmesh, and press your entire body into its vibrant panorama. This is a raw and real, brilliant and beautiful book.
—Christine Lark Fox
This book, which is unlike anything that has ever been seen before, brings something with it from the under-parts of sensation. This is the definition of vibration, of a book as the only possible membrane, the only future for a body so new it's still forming: j/j hastain gives us this.
—Bhanu Kapil
This work is consistently imaginative and beautifully controlled. Very musical and theatrical and intimate. The work is inspiring yet it's not easy or facile.
—Junior Burke
This work is interactive, and must be prefaced as such. Asymptotic Lover/Thermodynamic Vents is the future of poetry, the place where the word becomes god, becomes embodied, becomes Eucharist. This work is to be photographed, scribbled, masticated, and swallowed like biblical scrolls. It is the place of continuance, a threshold, a shape that circles around itself and never returns to itself, always beginning with ‘yes:' “the future will be the birthing of breath.” hastain's architecture will command you, require you, supplicate you incessantly to fully engage in the lyric—to ingest so deeply and intricately that the verse becomes scripture building cities in your veins. It is not that which can be understood solely by linear cognitive process. Rather, the press of word and sound invites the reader to consume with all senses, relying on the felt sensation and saturated synthesis of rogue images that bubble from internal cauldrons, that appear in disordered manner as lawless mystery.
Hastain's book bleeds ferociously of transgressive bordered bodies, presenting a neoteric philosophy of embodiment that thoroughly unearths any dichotomous conceptions of gender, and unabashedly bares internal organs in acts of eros. The poet's continuous gesture is in the asking: “what is the body for?”, and in the answering: “your vibrant marrow being sucked from this gathering of teeth,” and in the mantra: “this act of becoming GRAIL.”
—Julieanne Combest
…reading j/j hastain's new book i am moved into and through spacious silences, narrative, and epistolary lyric…i am brought into proprioceptive fields of sensory confusion and transmutation…”vomiting up my ventricles”…synaesthetic perceptions are activated…”does the alphabet ever stop its blossoms?”…in asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents it is as if methods of understanding and making sense are reorganized through an alternate motion…creating a new and different relational system…a reconfigured body…attempting to embrace…attempting to electrify and create a space for communion—the communion of gesture and imagination—and thus love.…
—Jared Hayes
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j/j hastain is a performance artist, photographer, musician, teacher, gender-revolutionary and phonic-theorist. j/j's poetry, essays and chapbooks have appeared in publications both online and in print:
Cliterature, Hot Whiskey, Mappemunde, MiPOesias, hotmetalpress Poetry Prize 2008, etc. j/j currently has a book coming out with livestock editions. j/j received a BA in poetry, music, gender and cultural studies, and an MFA in contemporary poetics.
j/j lives outside Boulder, CO with j/j's Beloved.
contact j/j at: www.jjhastain.com
