Description
Poetry. LGBT Studies. THE RELATIONAL ELATIONS OF ORPHANED ALGEBRA is a ground-breaking collaboration of poems and poetics essays. "Began" by Eileen R. Tabios who crafted poems melding algebra and orphans, this unique project was "finished" by j/j hastain who echoed the poems first musically and then by way of meditations on Trans identity(ies). The collaboration presents several text approaches including essays addressing Tabios' international adoption experience and hastain's suggestion for more natural and less violent pronouns that transcend gender binaries.
"Categories are not abstractions, they are bodies. Family is one such embodied category, gender another. What happens to bodies when they don't fit the categories assigned them, when they lack families, when they criss-cross gender or genre lines? How can one calculate such change, compose equations to explain these trans-categorical shifts? Our very pronouns are at stake, as are nations, blood-ties, definitions to words like 'dad' and 'belonging.' As j/j hastain writes, 'There is a new lineage that we are trying to make more apparent.' Tabios and hastain are trans-parents to a fresh embodiment of words and bodies, and to what they mean when they come together as books and persons. Their writing counts the change(s) in unexpected vocabularies."―Susan M. Schultz
Author Bio
Eileen R. Tabios has released 19 print, 4 electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art-essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a short story book and a collection of novels. Recipient of the Philippines' National Book Award for Poetry for her first poetry book Beyond Life Sentences, she has exhibited visual poetry and visual art throughout the United States and Asia. She has also edited, co-edited or conceptualized nine anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. Ms. Tabios has crafted a multi-awarded body of work, much of which is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism.
j/j hastain is the author of numerous full length, cross genre works as well as many chapbooks and artist's books. j/j is an Elective Affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv and a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j's books have been finalists in the Kelsey Street, Grey Book Press, Sawtooth and Ahsahta Press competitions. As a genderqueer writer and maker of things, j/j's books deal directly with the transgressive body, deviant gender, eros and identity construction as necessary compositional methods to living with empowerment in what can be a diminutive and polarizing world.
Author City: USA