Poet & educator exploring myth, diaspora, and emotional surrealism.
Jax NTP
POET
Educator
Writer Editor
Advance Praise for
In Bones & Tentacles: How to Pivot When You’re Paralyzed
by Jax NTP
(a forthcoming poetry collection from Moon Tide Press)
In Bones & Tentacles: How to Pivot When You’re Paralyzed is a surreal poetry collection that disturbs queer identity, the body, and the language of paralysis within the marginal “non-spaces” of transit, waiting rooms, and other architectures of disappearance. Through collage, erasure, ekphrasis, and epistolary poems, the book pivots between motion and stillness, unlearning the structures of identity and power that attempt to contain or fix the self.
The poems of In Bones & Tentacles are too skilled to be raw, and too ripped-open to be polished. They walk the edge I want my poetry to balance upon, one of fearless intensity and a dedication to craft that reveals a writer who knows who their literary ancestors are, and writes like a spell to charm them. This book has heart, bloody, pumping and perfectly designed.
— Michelle Tea
author of Little F
Jax NTP’s powerful debut, in bones & tentacles: how to pivot when you’re paralyzed, directly addresses an array of dazzling entities and beings, including “gender non-conformers,” “patron saint of unsung effigy,” and “wet streetlights and intimate things,” to name a few. The entire collection moves fluidly and confidently through NTP’s influences—writing after, or directly to, Federico Garcia Lorca and Frank O’Hara—deftly creating their seat at the living table of art and poetry. In rich, imagistic poems, such as “a nesting of queer anxiety in a cat’s cradle poem,” and “what if we can’t renounce citizenship,” NTP reckons with mental health, queer & national identity, as well as language as material, and the act of poem-making itself. This is a kaleidoscopic and darkly rewarding read.
— Allison Benis White
author of A Magnificent Loneliness
In Bones & Tentacles is a linguistically rich exploration of different kinds of topography: a lover’s tattooed skin, the Los Angeles freeway system during rush hour, or the shifting masses of a floating jellyfish. Taking their cue from poets such as Frank O’Hara and authors such as Virginia Woolf, Jax NTP reminds readers of the simultaneous vulnerability and creative possibility of the queer body while never losing sight of the abruptly shifting vocabularies that define the body’s parameters. Jax NTP’s meditations on corporeality resonate with lyrical accounts of the poet’s mother, who appears here in the kitchen and bathtub, a carer and a person cared for, a presence where language and poetry find their limits and their deepest sources of inspiration.
— Neil Hultgren, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English:
California State University, Long Beach
Enter the world of Jax NTP’s poems with a ladle and a scalpel. You will want to scoop up the language and dissect it, devour it and parse its palpable precision. Consider the titles: “dear reader/ the perfect subplot device is sold out” “two sculpins and honey jacks on the side” “June bug gum sole” “madness in all shapes of lavender” and, of course, “pin it.” Need you more persuading? Okey Dokey. These poems vibrate with images that seize and wed the disparate, populate with voice and vision, envelop with membranes sutured of chords and claims beyond the register. Proof: we are not post-pleasure! Let x = the “brusque push” and the “beauty of paranoia,” humanity in all its apple-crumbleness. To be carried around and quoted. I could go on. Must I?
— Patty Seyburn
author of Jukebox
The poems in Jax NTP’s collection are the suckers of an octopus that squirms up to its subjects, pierces them from several angles, then jets off in a smoke of mystic ink, reassembling page-miles away in freshly born forms. This book’s churning waters teem with gelatinous creatures—sweat-caked genderless invertebrates squirting over stanzas with a curious appetite for communication, for sex, for tropical fruits—who evolve into infinitely morphing abstractions to be discerned only once you squint hard through the bathymetric crush of the poet’s sonic and imaginative irrepressibility. inhale the culinary species sizzling in this poetry, digest these untamable feelings, and find your own mysteries wholly reflected at the bottom of Jax NTP’s maelstrom of meaning.
