EXTRATRANSMISSION

Andrea Abi-Karam’s debut poetry collection, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), takes on military exploitation of human and animal bodies, the scourge of bro culture, and the Uber-fication of urban space. Their forceful, often capslocked lines pursue a “poetry of directness” in opposition to the pervasive, unrippling “language of avoidance” that smooths over everyday potentials for confrontation. Employing repetition and polyvocality to move between contexts of contested embodiment, Abi-Karam gets at the problem of individual agency in global conflict and imperialism. "We live in a country that has mastered the art of using our brains against us. I look to poets who comprehend this and employ new vocabularies and forms to emblazon paths—new neural hallways lead to threshold decisions about how to live our day to day lives. Andrea Abi-Karam has written a singular and imperative text landing on a way to acquire our maximum potential as rebel beings who can kill coercion dead so we can move together 'beyond this one type of experience,' perhaps the most threatening, and frightening, act we can take as beings." —Stacy Szymaszek

Villainy

If we are to start again, "renewed or better," VILLAINY insists, we’ll first suffer the pain of radical un-making. Willingness to suffer such pains, in, for example, the desire to be "flat" (which would hurt) constitutes villainy while the world belongs to "1. CAPITALISM 2. THE STATE 3. COLONIALISM 4. NAZIS 5. RACISM 6. OPPRESSION." This is a text that performs the awful compression – squeezing – of our capacities collectively to deal with reckless disrespect for life not just under this government. This book is fire. But not to burn-it-down. To light my way to a friend.

—Simone White