cadences: cultivating cadences to invert the given creed

At the very beginning of cadences, j/j hastain announces that rather than the conventional model of opposing artifice to the body and the natural, artifice will very much interact with the body, the “pungent colony.” That is not to say that it’s a peaceful relation. In the very same first poem, hastain demands that the reader/lover burn their body when they die, except for the genitals and mouth, which we are to give to other lovers, like both works of art and art’s mediums. Violence against the body is a persistent motif in this collection; violence pierces and punctures the body, but not for the sake of damaging it, as much as to open it up to a “trans” state, a “spasming” aesthetic space where “black sand and pearls” are “being poured into one another.” The book takes us into an increasingly (wonderfully) Elizabethan idea of poetry: “I once covered you with dried rose heads and strips of words.” The spasming “tryst”, the art of these poems spasms back and forth in time as well as gender and love: “oh luminous anarchies!” Johannes Gorranson Words that have never been next to each other are next to each other now, lines that gut, a swarm of pink moths on your eyeskin. This book is a garden of “blood blooms” that will stop your breath. When hastain writes “We must create different versions of us to sound out the wounds on,” you’ll do so willingly. cadences is a dissection of love and space and sex that will teach you the new gender-language while pulling your chest open. Sarah Rose Etter “Making the body as the body is making”—this is the major project of cadences. Body transitivity is an ever-shifting locus in this work of thrilling prosody. Body ideation as “we eroticize our own gists”: body iterations, body play, body enthralling and body motility. The outcome is endless, there is no culmination. j/j’s work places the participant in a biome where revelatory becoming is a forever. Brenda Iijima Cadences, j/j hastain’s mesmerizing and daring new book, sings of the struggle to be visibly indecipherable yet decidedly human, on the move, metaphorical, “in transit,” or “as transits.” Human bodies move and are moved, contra static attempts at pronunciation or assignment, contra binarisms and racializations, against these processes which might end up the only categorically binding constant that can form us into a “we” in the first place. Across, underneath, away from and through existing social constraint groans, gurgles, and other timbres and tonalities are stuttering forth. Does the song of acknowledging the multifoliate human form of cadences’ lovers—their embodied and nurtured variousness and multiplicity—come with them from the “new eden” that grew around their love? How do we exist in a world outside normative signs of value? Can we make such a world at all past these importantly complex pages? In opening this vulnerable, human, desiring book of sacred song we are invited to find out. Invited to do so as an act of struggle, as experiment in sound and embodiment, as a “sojourn” with the real and urgent stakes of lives that love under siege, as a ritual archeology of the residue of bodies that question, want, and need—together. With its energetic activisms and with all its refusals-as-prosodic movements towards insurrection—with that “I” “saying a bell that groans instead of rings”—here, at cadences, is where future social-economic histories have room to imply themselves. Here is where the subaltern engagements of our species, multiple loves and entanglements, multiple ((de)gendered) forms moving across the furniture of the press, multiple and usually unacknowledged or oppressed ways of being in the world turn visible as having been performed. David Wolach