Villainy
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.
Andrea Abi-Karam answers the call to action for poetry itself to become the radical accomplice it was destined to be in their second book, Villainy. In order to live through the grief of the Ghostship Fire & the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The innovative second collection from Abi-Karam (Extratransmission) addresses personal pleasure, political solidarity, and an inevitably changing and changeable body. "I'm trying more to complain about how the riot gets more imaginative attention than physical attention," they write in a phrase characteristic of the collection's discursive mode. But intimacy interrupts such pursuits: "I try to read theory but just think of you fucking me with your entire hand." The collection uses lineated poems, slashed prose blocks, and all-caps exclamations to find a new way to communicate feeling, and the collective goal of imagining a safe and free future for queer people. Abi-Karam's play with capitalization, "I WANT A BETTER APOCALYPSE THIS ONE SUCKS," gives the collection a loud energy, but an interest in subtle variations across repeated passages, as well as in the interplay between irony and sincerity, will reward readers who pay attention. Abi-Karam writes with a revolutionary energy that invites the reader to rethink how a poem sounds, and what it can do on the page and beyond.
