Villainy

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 Andrea I like your experience. Thanks thanks thanks for this frank obtuse poetix, this wriggling book. Its wisdom is when I think I've summed it up it's something else - action and spatial, flat versatile wily & interior maybe even yeah poetic in that way only prose can be but CAPS-STRONG, manifesting today. Oh and here's my favorite line: resist the present approach impurity. Yessss! -Eileen Myles 'If we are to start again,' White says, '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