Ways of the Monster

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Disability Studies. Continuing and expanding the themes of CHELATE, THE WAYS OF THE MONSTER takes us through the everyday performance of inhabiting bodies that complicate the social landscape. Unpacking the tightly condensed formal page of his previous books, Jay Besemer now moves with readers through and between the physical and imaginary aspects of the "everyday": an actual, experienced urban Chicago; a totally fantastical Los Angeles; absurd encounters too complex to be legible, or legibly verbalized. With the poet's customary sensory and linguistic saturation, THE WAYS OF THE MONSTER confronts violence with refusal and counters abjection with contagious self-mutation. This book is part of The Operating System's Kin(d) Books and Projects Imprint, which is devoted to transgender and nonbinary creative practitioners.

"This is a text about the problem of being and the problem of matter: what matters, but also how being is matter, and what that feels like, what it can mean. The body is here but in pieces, promises, refusals, apparitions. Sometimes you know it only because it's the thing that shifts. The I and the you can't be trusted to be who they say they are, who you expect them to be. There are bodies, animals, objects, ideas, cities, and spirits, and there's a wetness to everything. It keeps slipping away from you, and delivering you somewhere new, like a river in a dream."--Johanna Hedva

"Jay Besemer's THE WAYS OF THE MONSTER provides us with poetic phenomenology of the interior and exterior, of minds surveying and essaying the world, embodied consciousnesses moving through and refiguring the surrounding landscapes. The monster here abides in the everyday, contingent, ephemeral, omnipresent: 'Alive, what motion is begun?'"--John Keene

Jay Besemer is the author of many poetic artifacts including TELEPHONE (2013) and CHELATE (2016), both from Brooklyn Arts Press, A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster to Daylily (Damask Press), Object with Man's Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil), THE WAYS OF THE MONSTER (The Operating System, 2018), and Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2019). He is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthology TROUBLING THE LINE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER POETRY AND POETICS. His performances and video poems have been featured in various live arts festivals and series, including Meekling Press' TALKS Series; Chicago Calling Arts Festival; Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading}; Absinthe & Zygote; @Salon 2014 and Sunday Circus. Jay also contributes performance texts, poems, and critical essays to numerous publications including Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature, Barzakh, The Collagist, PANK, Petra, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The VOLTA, and the CCM organs ENTROPY and ENCLAVE. He is a contributing editor with The Operating System, the co-editor of a special digital Yoko Ono tribute issue of Nerve Lantern, and founder of the Intermittent Series in Chicago. He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. He tweets frequently @divinetailor.