Today’s GalleyCrush is Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy, forthcoming from Nightboat Books on September 14, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.”
First lines: “THE END OF FASCISM LOOKS LIKE CENTURIES OF QUEERS DANCING ON THE GRAVE OF // 1. CAPITALISM / 2. THE STATE / 3. COLONIALISM / 4. NAZIS / 5. RACISM / 6. OPPRESSION”
Book buzz: “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
Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 136 pages.
Cover credit: Cover photo of author by Lix Z, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Author bio: Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg and author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. With Kay Gabriel, they coedited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are a Leo obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.
