Selected Poems from "In Bones and Tentacles: How to Pivot When You're Paralyzed"

In Bones & Tentacles: How To Pivot When You’re Paralyzed explores queer identity, the body, and language inside the unstable “non-spaces” described by anthropologist Marc Augé. Moving through experimental collage, ekphrasis, and epistolary, the poems examine the tension between agency and paralysis across immigrant memory, caregiving, and desire through a logic of self-sculpture and self-erasure.

In "let me teach you how to eat your lineage and metabolize it into something ferocious and salt-lit: a poetic manifesto," "Brotman Hall, 2nd Floor, Counseling & Psychological Services Window Faces the Metal Dandelion Molecule," (both located in PART FOUR: emptiness as an anecdote of clarity) and "dear baking soda on the bathroom floor - december 2024," (located in PART ONE: dear wet streetlights and intimate things) these poems treat language, inheritance, and care as unstable terrains through which identity is continually revised. They privilege contradiction over resolution, allowing surrealism and intimate observation to become methods of knowing the self.

Review six advance book blurbs from Michelle Tea, Allison Benis White, Patty Seyburn, Bill Mohr, Neil Hultgren, and AJ Urquidi on jaxntp.com.

Jax NTP teaches critical thinking, literature, and composition at Irvine Valley College, Golden West College, and Santa Ana College. Their words have been featured in Apogee Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Breakwater Review, Cordite Poetry Review (AU), Santa Clara Review, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. Read their debut poetry collection, In Bones & Tentacles: How to Pivot When You’re Paralyzed (Moon Tide Press). Website: https://jaxntp.com/