female semen into femme womb: review of a womb-shaped wormhole by j/j hastain

Publisher: BlazeVOX books
PubDate: 8/1/2011
ISBN: 9781609640750
Binding: PAPERBACK
Price: $16.00
Pages: 119


Over drinks the other night, I was talking to another poet who said that contemporary poets have moved away from myth. This might be true in a world of word games and carbon copies. However, a womb-shaped wormhole by j/j hastain is not lamentable in this way. “by funnel and by phallic” hastain gives over a “monotone-less monument” in which a mythological avatar, known as the unicorn, gets to know the virgin, while swimming into the virgin & becoming the virgin, thus drawing “the body of the beast to a submissive stance.” I swim in the myth of this; as reader, I enter a new virginity in which the unicorn is tamed, thrown into “positional rest.”

Of course the language here is often sexual, primordial, begging the most eloquent sex rites of ancient scenes where The Great Rite is enacted. A swell up in which “… the unicorn might tear the impending /virgin / into bloody bits.” This is not apologetic, but it is “beloved poise” through which an unseasonal ritual takes place. This is the uncovering of a sacred space that is not a line, but chora uninterrupted & thrashing.

Certainly many traditionalists will be made uncomfortable with this poetics of penetration, for the reader will be unicorn as well as virgin. There is a potency achieved, however, by taking on each of these roles, to reach into the tender regions, to swirl the “pits of papyrus” & feel the mantra.

There is a “she-alternate” which describes the you or the me or the I or the you. “… I no longer have a stopping point / there is no end to you.” This poetics of rewritten virginities, of being made pure via a letters of “utmost secretions,” truly articulates the mood of orgasm, going well beyond the Reichian tone & giving “so much / upcoming grind.” Thus, this is not just a book to be read, but a book to make out with. To feel & experience the “rhizomic resuscitations.”

-Debrah Morkun

Buy a womb-shaped wormhole HERE.