Chelate

by Jay Besemer

Written during the advent of hormone therapy and gender transition, Chelate by Jay Besemer explores the journey towards a new embodiment, one that is immediately complicated by the difficult news of a debilitating illness. This engaging chronicle speaks powerfully and poetically to the experience of inhabiting a toxic body, and the ruptures in consciousness and language that arise when confronted by a stark imperative, and choosing to live, and to change. The book moves intermittently from exile and alienation to hopeful anticipation, played out in short bursts of imaginative dreamwork, where desires eventually give way to their realities, as the self begins mapping the permutations of its momentous shift. What begins in uncertainty and commitment ends in self-recognition, and more uncertainty, but now in a necessary space unified by will, love, action, process, and documentation.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2016

About the author

Jay Besemer is the author of Telephone and Object with Man's Face (the latter available from Rain Taxi: http://www.raintaxi.com/chapbooks/#ohm )

Jay's work is also anthologized in Troubling the Line Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.

Jay Besemer is also the author of A New Territory Sought (Moria Books 2014) and the limited-edition chapbook Aster to Daylily (Damask Press 2014).

Reviews

[gracie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars with some highly memorable moments:

who wants to play with my rainy day - pg 24
exhaustion of the warmth of motivation - pg 44 (“build something small and invisible why don’t you ::”)
ears to the ground - pg 61 (“at what point does self-awareness become revisionist history”)
under the pardonable bridge of fear i learn to survive the worst of it - pg 67
erasing one file - pg 97
i want nothing but my - pg 99
the judge sits in a bucket & i think that’s okay - p 118

[Simeon Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Micro-blurb: an Orphic exegesis of dizzying and dysphoric beauty.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

another 2017 Poetry Read for the year

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoy his phrasing, the way each piece combines (sometimes) disparate elements to create a kind of portrait of... what, exactly? A moment, a feeling? Not always sure but I feel I can rest in them.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

"how did we get so stripped & scalded when all we wanted was to love ourselves"

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those volumes that I will continue to return to again and again.