Villainy
Written in the wake of the 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire and the 2017 Muslim ban, Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy moves from these spaces of tragedy toward radical futures built upon queer liberation and freed from fascist, capitalist, colonial, and racist terror. Abi-Karam explores how poetry might help close the gulf between language and revolutionary action and how art can be a “form of militancy” while opposing the violence that finds itself “CONCENTRATED LIKE A LIGHTNING BOLT” onto the body of the Other.
Infused throughout Villainy is a frenetic playfulness, a “TRANSFUSION OF GLAM,” and a celebration of all things punk, sexy, dirty, risky, villainous. Abi-Karam’s use of all capitals tattoos onto their poems a set of teeth, which, coupled with the baseline-beating anaphora, gives this collection a heady directness and evokes the energy and rhythm of a street protest. Manifesto-like, much of Villainy directs the reader to “inhabit public space / beyond the body” in order to carve “a freshly drawn geography.” In one poem, the speaker crashes through panes of glass and declares, “I’LL GET CUTS & ENJOY EACH & EVERY ONE B/C MY POWER / WILL BE MARKED UPON MY SKIN FOREVER.” The textspeak-like slashes interspersed throughout this work signify rupture and disfigurement, splicing and hacking, but they also convey the urgency of the skewed or slanted “I” and the question of “What does it mean to contain an identity / to contain an I in one body?”
Villainy advocates for the “possibility of unbecoming” and for an unravelling of the “gender webmess,” while calling on the political and poetic subject—including the reader—to leave behind a message on a border-wall that will soon be torn down. An underlying tension in this work is that between the need to archive and the desire to “refuse the archive / demand the immediacy.” The immediacy of Villainy comes through in its marking of all things opaque and unknowable, the lives inside the blurry outlines moving in a queer nightclub or at a trans march, where “for just a few hours / we approach / a queerness in public.”