“If Georges Bataille were a queer living in San Francisco in 2012, this could be xem, building and dismantling gender, that is, building and dismantling form itself. j/j hastain is writing a no-holds-barred break-neck love song that conflates the meaty and the sacramental. Here is love’s avid desire for detail, and love’s sacred, impossible overflow.” —Robert Gluck
“Whether it’s he or xe…of the yet to be pronounced pronouns, there’s one thing I’m sure of: while the pronouns might not yet be, what is certainly, forcefully here already is a sense of the atomic forces that lie buried within our wider programming. Of gender; of social form, of virility caught in its code. Hastain breaks these apart, not as categories, but as strings of language itself, as pure image. I see this as a bit more than a book–kind of a larger action whereby Hastain releases charged, energies into the frame, turning their blurry fury as gently in the hand as a baby bird’s feather. And damn the science. Companionable but aching, explosive and tenderly hilarious, this is a catastrophic, new bravery.” —Brandon Downing
