j/j hastain responds to Carrie Hunter's The Incompossible

Carrie Hunter’s The Incompossible is a hungry book that is evermore increasing hunger in us. As “a continuous transposition”--as a “mutual mastication” it is composed of and upholds zones of necessary fragmentation. We feel these fragmentations in our bodies as we move through (the book that is also a body) via both a process of stitching and of breaking down. The Incompossible fills us with bends and blends for a new grace. So “clandestine “among”— wherein we can be uncertain at the same time that we are sure. How comforting! How daunting!  True to what I believe to be Carrie’s impetuses here “what I inhabit makes me disappear.” And we can and we do disappear. Disappear as we are appearing! Oh gravities! Oh gift! “No such thing as interior or exterior” [] “we are spinning” and in that spin—that lucid pirouette—the reeling and the rotation grounds us as it make us levitate. I am saying “there is no such thing as opposites, only variations” and we feel these variations deeply as we travel through this moving mirror that is also an echo-location repeating its portions as bends.

The Incompossible is available through SPD.

j/j hastain is the author of numerous full-length, cross-genre works such as: asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents (BlazeVox Books), our bodies as beauty inducers (Rebel Satori Press), and ulterior eden (Otoliths), as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books.  j/j’s manuscript Let was a finalist in the 2010 Kelsey Street and Ahsahta book competitions. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award.