Priest/ess

Hastain's book blends several modes at once: personal memoir that refuses to settle into a conventional life story, a body-focused mapping of sensation, and a fierce queer voice that veers into outrage. Its pages move through self-directed harm, framed as a way of pruning unwanted parts of the psyche much as one deadheads a rose. Alongside this runs a reckoning with gender, described as both rot and creative labor, pushed toward a richer inner and telepathic abundance.

The author also turns to the occult and the erotic. Necromancy, quantum disturbance, and sex magic appear, including intimacy with a spouse and with unseen beings. Goddesses are summoned both willingly and under compulsion, and the work moves between eco-erotic imagery, queer desire, and the confessional. Throughout, the text considers its own form, treating poetics as both a joining of forces and a split made in pursuit of liberation.