The Relational Elations of Orphaned Algebra

Poetry. LGBT Studies. THE RELATIONAL ELATIONS OF ORPHANED ALGEBRA is a ground-breaking collaboration of poems and poetics essays. "Began" by Eileen R. Tabios who crafted poems melding algebra and orphans, this unique project was "finished" by j/j hastain who echoed the poems first musically and then by way of meditations on Trans identity(ies). The collaboration presents several text approaches including essays addressing Tabios' international adoption experience and hastain's suggestion for more natural and less violent pronouns that transcend gender binaries. "Categories are not abstractions, they are bodies. Family is one such embodied category, gender another. What happens to bodies when they don't fit the categories assigned them, when they lack families, when they criss-cross gender or genre lines? How can one calculate such change, compose equations to explain these trans-categorical shifts? Our very pronouns are at stake, as are nations, blood-ties, definitions to words like 'dad' and 'belonging.' As j/j hastain writes, 'There is a new lineage that we are trying to make more apparent.' Tabios and hastain are trans-parents to a fresh embodiment of words and bodies, and to what they mean when they come together as books and persons. Their writing counts the change(s) in unexpected vocabularies."Susan M. Schultz