Loudspeaker :: Preview of Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam

Writing

Sep 7

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If there was ever a time for queer punk activist poetics, it’s now. Andrea Abi-Karam’s poetry collection Villainy by Nightboat Books is a fiery body of work about survival and grief as a trans and arab-american.

“Written in the aftermath of the Muslim Ban and the Ghostship Fire in Oakland, which claimed thirty-six lives—among them Abi-Karam’s friends and community members—this astounding collection traverses Abi-Karam’s attempts to reckon with this grief.“ Nightboat Books

The voice of the collection has the feeling of a singular poet speaking for, and to, a grieving collective. It asks what it means to be an individual with a solitary body, and if pleasure and pain can be communal experiences that tie us closer together.

“Abi-Karam delivers immediate guerilla strikes: language that, like a collision between punk and poetry, makes it possible for language to scream, expand, and demand more from each other.” Nightboat Books

Sometimes, the poems are weapons, aggressive forms, animals with sharp teeth and soft lips. The poem’s shapes and direct language speak to the subject’s urgency. The words are loud, impossible to dismiss, and glimmering, a glittery mess of language.

This book meets the reader at the intersection of trauma and remembrance, at porousness and grit. I hope this book finds its way into the hands of those queer lives who need healing, whose hearts need the warm of Andrea’s spitfire text. These poems wrestle with the world, its violence and fleeting joy, and invites us to confront these truths, comforts, and peace, in ourselves.

Please enjoy this sneak peek into this incredible work below, and make sure to pre-order Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam here.

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Andrea Abi-Karam is the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION, a widely praised poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror and winner of the Kelsey Street Press Firsts! Prize judged by Bhanu Kapil, and Villainy, which was selected by Simone White as winner of the NOS Prize. They are also the co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. A performer as well as a poet and activist, Abi-Karam has truly given everything to write Villainy.

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