[Funky music plays]

Avren: From Dublin, California, this is Waves Breaking, a podcast where I talk to other
trans and gender-variant poets about poetry. I'm your host Avren Keating. In this episode,
I talk with Jai Arun Ravine. Jai Arun Ravine is a writer, dancer, and graphic designer. As
a mixed-race, mixed-gender, and mixed-genre artist, their work arises from the
simultaneity of text and body, and takes the form of video, performance, comics, and
handmade books. In this episode, I talk with them about their new book, The Romance of
Siam, just released from the Oakland press, Timeless Infinite Light. [music plays] Hello
Jai, welcome to Waves Breaking, it's so nice to have you.

Jai: Yay! So great to be here—in person (laughs).

Avren: So you flew out here from Philadelphia for the readings that you're giving
tomorrow and Monday, in celebration of your new book, Romance of Siam. And I was
wondering if you could talk about where you started for the research for the book, what
gave you the idea to do a satire or a changing of the travel book guide.

Jai: The material actually started way back even in 2010, when I was making this
performance piece and doing videos. Then I got this residency at Djerrassi, in the fall of
2011, and that's when I specifically focused on this project itself.

Avren: One of the first things you bring up in the first section, which is like advice for
walkers. You bring up the Jim Thompson character—

Jai: Uh huh.

Avren: That...his ghost comes up again and again in the book. In 2010, when you were
doing this residency, and you were doing this performance art, was there something about
Jim Thompson's character first that drew you into the work, or what was the draw?

Jai: Well I think—yeah. So the performance I did was called The Package Tour. It was
for the show that was about names. So I had recently renamed myself, and my name
included two Thai words that I had specifically chosen for myself. So then the
performance was like this tour through these different parts of my identity and included
being from West Virginia and being like a country boy. And it also included having a
mother who was a Thai immigrant, and you know, all those things. And then I did this
mash up where I did a dance with the traditional golden fingernails on, and I was playing
Thai hip-hop music, and also bluegrass (laughs) on vinyl. So, it was kind of like that. So
that was the performance. And I think, some of the work started then. There was a text
that I did for that show that I originally wrote then. And then, when I focused, when I was
in the residency for a whole month, I just was doing research, you know, on all these
weird things that I would find in American media that were about Thailand. Earlier that
year, I was in Thailand and I visited the Jim Thompson house (laughs) and so then I was
like, oh interesting. There's this guy, this white American guy who came in and then he
basically is credited with developing the Thai silk. And then I'd read about his story, and
it's like, oh he disappeared in Malaysia and was never found—and his body was never
found. And so I was like, well this is amazing. This kind of then symbolized to this desire
that I've felt from white people, that they really want to lose themselves in “the other,”
you know right? So then—then I think that snowballed. The King and I was a whole
wormhole (laughs) of its own, and there was so much in the book, and even that I wanted
to write about, (laughs) that isn't even in here. You know, and so much that after writing,
I'm like, "Oh…that is also part of this whole, this whole engine."

Avren: Do you feel comfortable talking about the things that didn't make it into the book
that you were interested in?

Jai: Yeah. Huh. Can I remember? (both laugh) Let's see, I wrote a few pieces about Thai
boy bands and Thai pop stars. (laughs) That just didn't work in the context of this book.
And...I wrote a piece about Thai ice tea that was actually for that original performance in
2010, that didn't actually work in the book itself. But I think later I was realizing this
whole stuff about Siamese twins that [00:04:05] has written some about in her work. And
I was like, "Oh." I didn't even look at that (laughs). You know. Then I was like, oh maybe
I could, you know...so—

Avren: Unlike many contemporary poets, of whom I've read, you clearly state your
objectives and your goals and your sources at the beginning of the poem, or right
underneath the poem. Did you know, in information sections—first of all, I loved those,
in the sense of how humorous and also scathing they are. How did you come to the
conclusion to put that material at the forefront of the text?

Jai: When I see performance, or when I see people read their work, I always really enjoy
context. What is the person interested in? How did they go about making it? Or, you
know, what is influencing them? I really value that. I value when people share that up
front because I feel it helps me frame and understand what the person is doing. So then I
just—I really like doing that. I feel like it's helpful to share the context or frame for what
I'm doing. Also the "did you knows" and "informations" are inspired by travel guides,
guidebooks, the things on the side—did you know? So I think, I was working with so
many source materials and then mashing them up, and then referencing a bunch of
different things that I feel like some people won't know all of them. So I thought it was
important to show, "Oh, here's—this is from this, this is from this." And to kind of map
all those references.

Avren: Yeah, I looked up the once in a lifetime commercial (laughs) and I watched all—
it was a horrible seven minutes of it—

Jai: (laughing) Yes.

Avren: And it's just full of these, it's really quite sad. It's these women who are dancing
traditionally, and all of the people in Thailand have these just giant smiles.

Jai: Yeah. Uh huh.

Avren: And there's something about your work that really pokes at that smile of like,
"we're here to invite you to lose yourself—"

Jai: Right.

Avren: Come, spend your money here—

Jai: Right. Yes. Uh huh—

Avren: Kind of a thing—

Jai: Yeah—

Avren: There seems to be a balance between the humor and sarcasm in portraying—I'm
thinking of the Museum of National Thai Identity or the Pad Thai piece specifically
where it's just mountains of pad thai that's decaying, and it's still there and you have to
preserve it. And I'm wondering, how you felt about critiquing this tourist economy and
your views on that.

Jai: I think I want to actually respond to the first question, to help this question. Yeah,
because when you were asking me earlier about the initial draw and the performance I
did called The Package Tour, one of the things is that I started to feel like my time
actually being in Thailand; I was there for six months studying abroad. And then I was
there for another two months making a film several years after that. And so, I feel like my
experiences in Thailand weren't of belonging but of being an outsider. And so, I think the
initial spark of that performance and of this book is of feeling myself like a tourist, or
even, feeling almost the same as a white dude (laughs), who's being a tourist in Thailand,
and feeling this conflict around, I am Thai, but also feeling like I am the same as a white
tourist. Yeah. I think that—(laughs).

Avren: That definitely helps.

Jai: I think that answers from before.

Avren: Mm hmm.

Jai: And then—because I actually haven't written much parody and satire before. Or even
used a lot of humor in my writing (laughs). But I think that just from my research, and
being in these internet wormholes, and all these books and movies, just feeling the
absurdity of what the Western imaginary is, or what these white male fantasies are
feeling. All of this is just so absurd and when I start to inhabit that, then like, the parody
and satire almost just naturally just fell out. You know. How can you not just laugh? I
mean it's sad, but it's also just hilarious. At the same time to me, that these things are I
don't know, naturally occurring in an imagination, or a fantasy, or a romance of this
country, so—yeah.
Avren: And you go into the real past roots of this romance.

Jai: Uh huh.

Avren: And this sort of exotification of Thailand with the characters that are embodied in
the work. You embody Jim Thompson. Through these other historical figures and ghosts,
you're mimicking the colonizing force of tourism. And you go really far back and you
examine those roots of the tourist industry that you parody. Did you have any mental
slash emotional force field to help you embody these characters to protect you from the
sort of toxic white gaze, or embodying the white gaze to critique the white gaze?

Jai: Yeah, yeah. I mean I think one of the strategies I had, because I wrote a lot of it on
residency and I wrote a lot of it when I was staying in a friend of mine's dance studio loft.
So, I had like a contained space. I would actually listen to a lot of music and albums over
and over again. I mean my strategy also was that I was imagining a landscape or a place
where these characters would enter and inhabit and then talk to each other. So I think that
that framing really helped me because I was imagining the landscape in which these
things were happening. But I think also the music definitely helped because I wrote the
Romance of the Siamese Dream while listening to the Smashing Pumpkins album
(laughs) Siamese Dream, on repeat. And then there was Ladytron album called Gravity
Seducer that had a white elephant song on it, and then I just listened to that on repeat, for
like the White Elephant Ride piece. And then, Kronos Quartet had this album called
White Man Sleeps for the Twelve Meanings of Escape Series. So, I think something
about listening to music was helpful, I guess, in protecting myself within this thing I was
imagining (laughs).

[ambient music plays]

Avren: Was it liberating at all to not have to be tied to specific eye or narrator character?
The narrator comes in at the really vulnerable points—

Jai: Yeah, yeah.

Avren: But, for the most part, the voices are varied. And, in a lot of your work the voice
is not necessarily embodied.

Jai: Right. Uh huh.

Avren: Could you talk a bit about that?

Jai: Yeah. I think it was really fun for me to be kind of conducting or orchestrating these
landscapes where these other characters were interacting with each other. I think
especially my first book, it was really from a personal place of my own history and
memory and relationships. And so…yeah. I think it was really fun to then kind of be on
the outside. But then also, it was also fun to then insert myself too (laughs) or then to
perform as these people too. Yeah. I found it really—
Avren: Fun.

Jai: (laughs)

Avren: The collection exposes these wounds of colonization through the tourist industry,
and through exotification—

Jai: Mm hmm.

Avren: It also shows the wounds that this has caused on Thai spirituality as well, and
Buddhism. I was wondering if you could talk about the last poem in the piece, Pagoda: A
Lecture on Mutability, in relation to those themes.

Jai: Yeah. The gentleman in the pagoda section I wrote because I was reading W.
Somerset Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour, which a subtitle of that book is "A
Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong," which was written in 1930. And it's
kind of like a travel text. The main character of that book goes through Thailand at some
point. And so, I was kind of just fascinated by his language; how he was talking about
travel, and being in another country. I literally just pulled straight up lines from his text
and tried to embody them in my own way. And it's very ominous that I end the book with
this section. But yeah, with this I wanted to talk about how these Orientalists who kind of
like a Jim Thompson story, how the Orientalist kind of disappears within the culture that
he's traveling to, and dies almost within in it. But then is also, weirdly resurrected within
it.

Avren: See that's interesting because I didn't see the "I" speaker in the last poem to your
mom.

Jai: Oh, uh huh.

Avren: I saw the "I" in that poem to be the narrator.

Jai: Oh, I see.

Avren: Which is really interesting.

Jai: Hmm

Avren: But I think I just totally misread it.

Jai: Oh well, yeah. Well, no. But then that—that's very interesting that you saw it that
way. Hmm, wow (laughs). That makes it very different then. It's almost like a weird
nostalgia or purity or something or authenticity of a Thai essence, that is becoming
mummified (laughs).

Avren: Yeah.
Jai: Which also I feel also applies (laughs). So—I guess when I originally wrote it I was
still using mom's voice. It was like the white Orientalist, who is kind of being
mummified, within this structure.

Avren: He becomes fully—mummified in the white desire.

Jai: Yeah. At the end I say that his real self lives in a book. But his character is in this
pagoda (both laugh). Yeah, I was really fascinated by this blurring of fact and fiction.
People began to talk about travel in other countries.

Avren: Are there any pieces in the book that you would like to read?

Jai: Oh yeah. Let me think about that (laughs). Okay, so this one is called Backpackers.
This is a sestina that was written from six words I pulled from random from the first few
pages of Alex Garland's novel, The Beach—that was written in 1996. And it's also
evoking the movie that was made from the book (laughs), The Beach, which stars
Leonardo DiCaprio (laughs).

BACKPACKERS

Every story about Thailand starts with you, a young American

backpacker on holiday, walking in flip-flops and cargo shorts
and Beer Chang tank tops through markets of bootlegs of boot-
legs of tourists, through guesthouses overrun by roaches and
beautiful French girls having sex in the next room. You have to
turn on the fan just to blow away all the smoke coming off her
body. Pull the pin and she’s like a smoke bomb for signaling
or as a screening device.

With all your boy-scout military backpacking skills, you’re

handy with pockets and a fantastic guide to getting there and
away, to paradise where everything is bootlegged and cheap,
where sandwiches and coffee are French and freshly imported.
When you light up a roach, you’re not thinking about the his-
tory of imperialism. Cockroaches scuttle like they do in fiction
books on Thailand. “I want to smoke this blow with you,” say
the French girls, fresh out of the shower. The French girls
are filming your next porn film in their minds and the main
character is a backpacker: young-ish, American-ish, White-ish,
with a bootleg because he has no legs.

The fan has three settings but it’s stopped oscillating. Fre-
netic fan clubs follow you everywhere ever since THE ROACH
GUESTHOUSE made it big on the bootleg circuit. Tourists
want pirated DVDs made from the bootleg of the novel of the
bootleg of smoke. My country is going up in smoke all because
of you backpacker, and because I studied Spanish instead of
French in high school. Who colonized more people, the French
or the Spanish? Either way, Thailand is in the middle asking for
more fans and printing plane tickets and translating brochures
badly for backpackers, asking them to go on reckless drunken
tuk-tuk rides, even off trail to get attacked by roaches—all the
while blowing smoke up the ass of the fantasy of white sand
beaches bootlegged from a movie banned in Thailand, which
is a bootleg from America.

But don’t worry, we won’t forget about the French girl. We

know. She wants to bum a smoke.

All we need is a fan, some phosphorescence and the scuttle

of cockroaches playing shuttlecock to make you a happy
Backpacker. Backpackers have bootlegged THAILAND: THE
MOVIE, starring roaches and French girls and fans that don’t
work, obscuring me in smoke.

***

Avren: So good.

(both laugh)

Jai: And if you just think about The Beach—it's it's own wonderful thing (laughs).

Avren: Sounded terrible.

Jai: Just think 2000. Think Moby and that song Porcelain, and just you know—

Avren: Yeah, Moby shows up briefly (both laugh).

[electronic music plays and fades]

Avren: You talked about your time in Thailand and how you sort of felt like an outsider
in Thailand. Do you feel in writing this, you've come to sort of any different space in
your relationship with Thailand, and with your Thai identity?

Jai: Right yeah. Gabriel [00:17:33] and I recently interviewed each other about our
work, and he had something really great to say. We talked a lot about adjacency to
identity, which is a word that he used to talk about himself. And so, he had an
observation when he read my work; that I'm reading a lot about tourism, and reading
these texts and embodying these characters, but I'm doing it in a way where I'm bringing
me next to myself, you know. Come back to this adjacency thing. I was really inspired by
his observation of that, because I feel like when I started this book, I had this deep kind of
conflict I guess, actually. I was like well, I'm half Thai, but I'm also half white, so, I also
feel like I'm a tourist (laughs). You know. And, a tourist to myself. So, so now I think
writing this book was me trying to come to terms with what is that? What is it to be a
tourist to myself? But now, I feel like that—you know, Orientalism is messed up (laughs)
when it pervades a lot of ways we think about our world, actually. You know, even today.

Avren: Do you feel like that dichotomy within yourself of being—adjacent—

Jai: Yeah, I think that now, now I think I'm—I think the dichotomy is maybe softened or
something; or like the duality has softened or something. Where it's like it's not so much
of a battle anymore, or something. Or of...or of an either or anymore. So I think maybe
that (laughs). I think it's more of a non-binary way of like thinking of my ethnic identity
(laughs).

Avren: Right. Yes, because I mean your work is very much non-binary. Your gender is
non-binary. In a way, this text sort of holds all of that. It's both heavily critical and also
humorous. And, it's poetry but it's also a play. It's lyric. Did it lead to any other projects
that you're currently working on? Did sort of coming to a conclusions after having
written this book lead you onto other further investigations?

Jai: I mean, what I'm working on now is kind of different, yet maybe related? Because
I've been working on this text, this book for so long, since yeah, since 2011. Now I'm
actually working on a collaborative project with a writer with a writer named Coda Wei
It's this serial episodic epic that contains text, it contains gifs, and images and comics,
and it's called Ambient Asian Space (laughs). Because we're both non-binary folks of
Asian descent, and so, so we've been writing this thing collaboratively back and forth.
You can go to noodlecroons.tmblr.com and take a look. We've been slowly releasing
episodes and gifs and comics on there, so you can stay tuned on there for that.

Avren: That sounds so funny.

[electronic music plays and fades]

Jai: Now I'm going to read a couple little pieces from this exhibit catalogue that I created
for a fictional American Museum of Thai National Character. So, I was like, what if there
was a museum in American that thought it was this authority of what it means to be Thai.
There a couple pieces from this exhibit catalogue I'll read.

PAD THAI (1990- )

In the American Museum of Thai National Character, Rirkrit

Tiranvanija (pronounced Tea-rah-vah-nit) empties everything
out except himself and an electric wok. In this duration piece,
which builds on years of expertise as a cultural worker and
chef, Tea-rah-vah-nit will make Pad Thai twenty-four hours a
day for a period of six months.
Museum members on their obligatory stroll toss half-eaten
bowls in the bins, curiosity satisfied, before discussing the
exhibit’s merits over cocktails at the ritzy Thai restaurant across
the street. On First Tuesdays, free admission draws broke art
students and the homeless for a quick cruise-n-schmooze and
a free meal. Plastic forks and wooden chopsticks pile up. Tea-
rah-vah-nit’s installation of overflowing black garbage bins is
like a karaoke ghost sculpture—disconcerting, thrilling, simple.

The administration and curatorial staff were reluctant to turn

the gallery into a soup kitchen. But the piles of rotting Pad
Thai (as well as the flies and mold growth that accumulate)
is a fresh commentary on the popularity of this quintessential
Thai dish within a system of modernity spiraling toward entropy.
despite bugs, mice and mice turds, the red pepper flakes and
hardened rice sticks are still Thai.

This exhibit is about the perseverance of the Thai spirit.

Everyone wants to watch the Pad Thai rot.

***

Avren: (both laugh) Okay. I just have to say, the quick little summaries of the quote
"intent," unquote, of each of the art pieces is so good. Its commentary on the
perseverance of Thai identity is just so spot on.

Jai: And that one was inspired by—Tiravanija is an actual artist who did, he actually did
make pad thai in a gallery. And that was a thing he did, and so I was inspired by that
project. And then, this other piece of the catalogue is called Rejection and it is inspired by
discovering that my mother had applied to secretarial colleges in the UK, in the 1960's,
and rejected from most of them (laughs). I mean, from probably all of them. And so this
is an exhibit inspired by that.

REJECTION (1960 - )

In the American Museum of Thai National Character there is

an exhibit of rejection letters addressed to Thai women who
applied to secretarial colleges in the UK in the 1960s. Each
envelope has been neatly opened by a letter-opener. They are
dropped one by one at one-minute intervals from the ceiling
via a mechanized arm, creating a growing pile on the gallery
floor. The shear amount of these letters is a testament to the
persistence of the Thai spirit.

Some of the letters fall out of their envelopes and unfold.

***

Avren: See that moment with the envelopes unfolding, is a moment where I feel the
narrator's voice comes in a little more. There's these small moments where the narrator of
the tour guide inserts their insights onto things. I think at one point they call the golden
traditional fingernails for dancing, "creepy." What compelled you to add these sort of
asides, rather than keeping it a very much neutral narrator. This narrator has a personality
and an insight.

Jai: Right. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Most of the pieces in this book aren't I guess
from my personal experience, or my personal "I." There is a couple, like the Thai Tiger
Temple one…is one from a personal experience because I was thinking about myself and
then my friend Ronaldo B. Wilson, whose mother is Filipino, and so, we've had
conversations where we talk about being mixed, and what that means—and our mothers,
and our relationships to our mothers, and our relationship to our mothers. And so, and
then I was thinking about Tiger Woods who also, similar to Ronaldo, who has an Asian,
and in Tiger's case, a Thai mother and a Black father. And so, I was thinking about our
mixed-ness and how to relate to that.

Avren: I'm remembering the ending of the poem—seemed, the envoy of the sestina
where you're wrapping everything together. It seemed very much like in the envoy, you're
bringing all these images together, at that particular moment. It breaks.

Jai: What this one?

Avren: Yeah.

Jai: This one actually isn't a sestina (laughs).

Avren: Oh, well shit! There you go.

Jai: (laughs) Yeah, this one is—

Avren: In that—in that ending stanza—feels like everything instead of coming together,
falls apart.

Jai: Right, yeah. This ends with a line that's actually Tiger's mother talking about her
mother, in this article I read; which I thought was so fascinating. So I added that in.

Avren: I had such a hard figuring out what were sestinas and what weren't—
Jai: I know, right? (laughs)

Avren: Which was really kind of fantastic. You take a really traditional form, and you're
using for a tool for decolonizing the imaginatory. And I'm wondering if you could talk
about how you came to choosing the sestina, and your approaches to making the form
new.

Jai: Yeah. Totally. I had actually never also written in any forms, (laughs). I mean, as
extensively as before. But my first semester at Naropa, I took a class with Akilah Oliver,
rest in power, called “Eros and Loss in Poetic Construction.” And so, we read this book
by Jo Ann Wasserman, called The Escape. And she had written a whole book of sestinas
dealing with the grief of losing her mother, if I'm remembering that correctly. So, we had
read that book, this was back in 2005. But I had kept that book and had remembered that,
and so I brought it with me on my residency, and so, I was like "Oh, what if I tried to
write a bunch of sestinas?" And so, I'm here at Djerassi writing so many sestinas. It was
almost effortless almost, writing them, for some reason. Because the obsessiveness that I
felt from Jo Ann's sestinas really worked for me, because I also felt like obsessed about
my material and about you now, my own relationship to the material. And so, it was so
perfect for my material. In that way, in that it's like sort of repeating, but it's sort of
searching for something but not holding onto something at the same time. But the—when
this book became a book book, I actually realized that I—well, it was two things. It was
that, one of the reasons was that the format of the book was going to be really narrow and
my sestinas, because I had written them long wise, in landscape orientation, where my
lines were like really long, so it also didn't work. But then, also coming back to those
sestinas later, I took out the line breaks, and I was like, "Oh I'm still actually—I think it
still works without the line breaks." Because I still feel the energy of it, is still moving
forward in a way where I don't need the breaks anymore. Then I enjoy taking the breaks
out, and putting them into blocks, and then reading them that way, so—

Avren: I've only written one or two sestinas, and personally I found them incredibly
difficult (laughter). [music plays and fades] So The Oriental Hotel seems...a parody of the
Hotel California song. Was that an intentional thing you were doing?

Jai: No, but that makes total sense now.

Avren: It's sort of—these ghosts go for an escape and never leave.

Jai: Right right right! Yes! (laughs). That's so true.

Avren: I'm really interested in thinking about The Jungle Box as a sort of wormhole.

Jai: Yes, yes. Uh huh.

Avren: Could you talk a little bit about your interest in The Jungle Box, and also the
concept of wormholes (laughter)? Because I think the concept of wormholes come up
quite a bit.
Jai: (laughs) Yes. Well, The Jungle Box is the sequence that I wrote that was inspired in
part by the story of Jim Thompson, who was the silk king, created the industry of Thai
silk in Thailand, and then disappeared in a jungle in Malaysia on vacation in 68. There
was this whole drama around. They brought in mystics, Indigenous folks. They brought
in other paranormal researchers to find in and his body was never found. And so, I was
like "Wow. There's this place where all these white guys go and they die there, slash, they
live there." (laughs)

Avren: Sort of like Schrodinger's cat, where they're both alive and not, in this place—

Jai: And ghosted. And The Jungle Box came from this actual story—that he kept his pills
in this little antique silver box, which his friends jokingly called his "jungle box."

Avren: (laughter) I also feel that the narrator is sort of like a ghost of the text.

Jai: Right, yeah, indeed.

Avren: And if the ghost had any relation to or—I believe that the ghost become figures or
metaphorical figures for colonization.

Jai: Right, right, yeah. That's interesting, because in a way tourism is like the ghost that is
colonizing Thailand, but in the background almost (laughs). You know? Where it just
kind of creeps up and builds up. And then suddenly it's there, but no one knows how it
got there. Oh yeah it's true. In The Jungle Box we've got Jim Thompson, we've got W.
Somerset Maugham, we've got Jerry Hopkins, whose this guy who wrote this book called
Bangkok Babylon, and so, it's like this story of the ex-pat who goes and—because Jerry
Hopkin's story is he came to Thailand with three suitcases, and then just fell in love with
the country, and never left. So, that concept was just so fascinating to me as someone
who feels like they could never actually live in Thailand (laughs). Or this concept of you
go somewhere, and you never want to leave, you know? And also this other British
anthropologist named Pat Noone.

Avren: Slash, Pat No-one.

Jai: Slash, Pat No-one. Yeah (laughs). And then I have a whole sequence where I imagine
Jim having this dream where he dreams about the different ways he could die. But it's
from what came up when I Googled the word "escape." So that was fascinating. I'll
sample the Enrique Iglesias song Escape—

Avren: The poem, I think it was Death by Tiger—

Jai: Oh yeah, yeah.

Avren: In the escape section—was my favorite.

Jai: (laughs) Yeah. Totally.

Avren: I don't know why it was my favorite. But there was something about the tiger one,
where the tiger—there's a twist in it. I forget.

Jai: Yeah. He comes out of the gramophone (laughs).

Avren: And his teeth come down like a paper cutter. There's something about the fact that
the teeth are related to a paper cutter that's just—kind of mind blowing. I just want to say,
thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. I really appreciate your work
and the art you create—your performance art, and your graphic art, and your poetry—
your essays and reviews. You do everything. So thank you for being here.

Jai: Yeah. Thank you so much. It was such a great conversation to hear how you're
relating to it, and to talk more this whole project. Thank you.

[music plays]

Aven: All right folks, that's the show for this week. As always, links to the various
authors and books mentioned will be posted in the show notes. Please spread the word
about this show. I know the world of trans and gender-variant poetry is small, and we're a
niche community. But both a larger following and iTunes reviews are needed to sustain
this program. If you have any feedback or questions, you can contact me at
wavesbreakingshow@gmail.com or on Twitter @mxavren. Again, I'm your host Avren
Keating. Transcripts are by Amir Rabiyah.

And this is the sound of Waves Breaking.

[song plays]