Chelate - Tapa blanda

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.

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), and Object with Man's Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). 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, where he lives with his partner and a very helpful cat.