Eileen Tabios / j j hastain's collaboration in POST-CRISIS POETICS

Eileen R. Tabios' and j/j hastain's collaborative book the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA is addressed in T.C. Marshall's essay, “A Secret Agent, a Spaceman, & a Talking Bear: ATheory of Doubling the Stakes in Poetry” for POST-CRISIS POETICS edited by Brian Ang. Here's an excerpt:

Eileen Tabios and j/j hastain have carried doubling into a collaborative text that combines her “sense of physicality” with hastain’s trans identity and “the idea of the poem as also a body,” all while working with her adopted son’s school life and the condition of orphaned bodies (v. my review in GR #20). This seemingly labyrinthine combination was for her “a useful scaffolding for managing personal biases and emotion so that they did not get in the way of creating the poem.” She ends this book with “A Poetics Fragment” that expresses the belief that a poem is “completed elsewhere” by others, beyond the poet’s realm of control, and that “one poem can have many different completions.” This is the essence of the noetic, where questionings and contradictions put off conclusions.