The Ways of the Monster

Author: Jay Besemer Publisher: The Operating System (2018) Continuing and expanding the themes of Chelate, The Ways of the Monster takes us through the everyday performance of inhabiting bodies that complicate the social landscape. Unpacking the tightly condensed formal page of his previous books, Jay Besemer now moves with readers through and between the physical and imaginary aspects of the "everyday": an actual, experienced urban Chicago; a totally fantastical Los Angeles; absurd encounters too complex to be legible, or legibly verbalized. With the poet's customary sensory and linguistic saturation, The Ways of the Monster confronts violence with refusal and counters abjection with contagious self-mutation. This book is part of The Operating System's Kin(d) Books and Projects Imprint, which is devoted to transgender and nonbinary creative practitioners."This is a text about the problem of being and the problem of matter: what matters, but also how being is matter, and what that feel