Men & Sleep

by Jay Besemer

Composed using words chosen from children's early to mid 20th-century readers and from early 20th-century natural history textbooks, Men & Sleep exposes hidden currents and meanings in teaching materials from the past. The two long poems presented in this volume draw readers into a strange yet quotidian world of ordinary wonder and transformation. Inhabiting creaturely life & plant/animal co-embodiment--queering sexual, gender & even species distinctions--this book invites readers to mix (in) their own evanescent experiences. Moving beyond the limits of linear narrative or cause and effect, Men & Sleep requests and makes space for repeated engagements, just as if readers were exploring a forest or a marsh. When it's never quite clear whether the being you encounter here is a human, a tree, an insect or some unique combination of all of these, how do you behave? How does their behavior impact you? How do you both change in the encounter? Perhaps these questions will help Men & Sleep reveal itself to you. "Can poetry be both mysterious and physical? I am utterly intrigued by Jay Besemer's Men & Sleep . It is an immersive book that hums with the sensuality of "spore-filled organs" as it meditates on the relationship between language, masculinity and nature. While it is a book of trees, it's also a decidedly horizontal we creep through the mosses and leaves, smelling the 'puzzling odor.'"--Johannes Gˆransson "When I see a tree I think "Trees enjoy being trees." Or maybe it's more accurate to say I feel them; their commitment to the vitality of struggle and survival as enjoyment and pleasure. As I was reading this collection I thought, Jay Besemer understands what I mean by this, even though we've never met or had a conversation. Human beings are also this way, like trees, or are we trees? The word "like" here doesn't feel quite right, to designate separateness. In "the sexual autumn" we respond to change entangled with the earth beings we've othered through language. Poetry brings us back home to where we belong."--Nikki Wallschlaeger Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.

100 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2023

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

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jay Besemer’s Men & Sleep is a restlessly melodic verse of fractured energy and subtracted expedition. Ah, the maleness of my fake and tired knowing. A me-shaped forgetting. A you. I’m exhausted and can’t sleep. Sleep won’t die. I don’t know what my speaking touches. I don’t know where. Here is weather: The recency bias of the wounded latter. Here is a forest: The unbodied nearness of the hurt now. Besemer’s voice is pinpoint, but also un-surrounded. Bread and breadth. An underground melancholy, a pop-up tremor. The middle is the only beginning that can disprove origin. Tree, because tree. Ah, this formfitting imagery, squeezed through a scarred peephole. And these who-less creatures bathed far-off by the darkening of tomorrow’s remnant astonishment. It’s all here because it’s all there. One will feel partially found. Not by the all-ness of connection, nah. But by the mapped disconnection that holds things to the same legit remoteness.