Villainy

Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.

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Selected by Simone White as Winner of the NOS Prize

2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST!

Additional information

Weight 0.48 lbs
Format

eBook, Paperback

In order to live through the grief of the Ghost Ship Fire and 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.

 

Click here to read an interview with Andrea Abi-Karam on the Nightboat blog!

Praise

“In an industry that encourages the toothless, Andrea Abi-Karam’s propulsive Villainy calls: ‘give the poem teeth.’ In an industry that incants, this book incites, revealing the revolutionary potential of desire, of determined disfiguration, of poetry itself, which, in Abi-Karam’s hands and ways becomes, as the street, a site of unbounded action. Here is a poetry that demolishes poetry. A fire to our fascist order. A book fully alive.”

-Solmaz Sharif
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Details
ISBN: 9781643621104
Paperback, 136 pages, 5.5 x 8
Publication Date: September 14, 2021
Reviews

Villainy incites the reader to action while dignifying queer grief and rage by conceding no easy answers, reminding us that the word “art” once referred to something practiced with the hands.

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Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) and with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We …

More about Andrea Abi-Karam