it matters to me that you are a womanbecause you define yourself as a womanThis collection by poet j/j hastain is a personal journey through gender. Sometimes sensual, sometimes erotic, these poems resonate with love in all its forms, melding together society's preconceived notions of "straight" or "gay" or "lesbian," "male" or "female," "top" or "bottom," "masculine" or "feminine" to create a genderqueer landscape where the lines blur and the labels no longer stick. we in my Trans is at its heart a series of love poems concerning what of sensation, exists between -- whether by way of the rolling folds of desire or in overlaps with a lover. These are poems that embrace one's self as much as another.j/j defines as Trans/genderqueer, which is different than Transgender, though not at all discounting it. j/j is interested in identity construction via active documents -- utilizing methods that are not at all related to previously determined models (with binary derived bases). j/j's work involves embodying, inhabiting, and populating the body as one would a neoteric space -- through ways and methods that are not related to formerly prescribed shapes that are based in limit."I had forgotten my own throat. Then I started reading the work of j/j hastain. Whatever your alliance with order, you will burn it for how you will whimper in j/j's writing. Trans as ka­leidoscope. 'how the pronoun was a lock ... a blockade.' I have read no one else whose words are so entirely without skin. Every line without shelter. Every line without line. There isn't a single deceit. Ever. j/j's work leaves me wordless. Always. j/j is the only writer who writes me into wordlessness. My bones have been searching for themselves since j/j's last line." -- Andrea Gibson