Description
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. EXTRATRANSMISSION is a poetic critique of nationalism, patriarchy & gender embedded in an explosive & unapologetic trauma narrative. It begins with an exhaustive loud, & unapologetic section on killing bros, the perpetrators of patriarchy before entering a narrative of how traumatic brain injury occurs to bodies in modern warfare. The text labors over how memory constructs our identity, our constant experience and how that can be destroyed in one of many empty military moments. The language pushes beyond conventional lyric and incorporates angry letters, prose pieces, a love poem, & intimate conversation while maintaining both an intense energy and constant movement. In resistance to how patriarchy and U.S. militarism produce the hypergendered subject, the text generates a genderqueer cyborg whose language comes together to form EXTRATRANSMISSION a book that explicates how patriarchy, capitalism, & nationalism form the high rising global city that will tear your heart out.
"This is demanding prose that scrapes at the bones of psychic worlds. There's nothing accidental about a signature injury, Andrea Abi-Karam avers, and their searing interrogation of the wounds of militarization, masculinity, and trauma is unflinching yet implosive. From #metoo to war machines, every once-removed scale of violence comes crashing into each other, leaving the reader raw with implication. We are haunted with ledgers that can never be balanced."—Jasbir Puar
"As the war machine creates new casualties and new ways to produce them, Andrea Abi-Karam creates a new language and a new form to express their desire to shake the American public out of its lethargy. They bring their generosity of heart mixed to a real courage, as they do the opposite of what we do: Andrea 'goes into it,' as we say, they look in the face the incredible suffering that weapons which replaced rain shower on the people of the world. Pain is singular, it reaches its targets one at a time, and they seem to follow every soldier hurt as well as every individual they themselves killed or maimed. In these days of indifference to naked reality, Andrea dares be a writer of humanism, they dare to remind us that each one of us is somehow responsible for everything that is done in our name."—Etel Adnan
"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
"If Puar offers us a theoretical landscape for understanding how queer visibility is instrumentalized by the US war machine, then Abi-Karam's EXTRATRANSMISSION is a manifesto for ungovernable queers that comes out of that landscape. It is a manifesto for those who would rather be considered criminals in the pursuit of a collective insurgency than be affiliated with the pigs."—Zaina Alsous, Mask Magazine
"Animals appear throughout the collection. There are lab rats, therapy horses, therapy dogs, and dying fawns. For all intents and purposes, not machines or cyborgs. Each animal lives in relation to humans and is never far away from being a tool and subsequently, a weapon."—Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Barrelhouse Magazine
"Andrea Abi-Karam's EXTRATRANSMISSION approaches the trauma of gendered and militarized violence by zooming in and out simultaneously: from vengeful desires directed at masculine figures (cops, music bros, tech bros, other myriad bro types) to horror at the intricacy and reach of algorithmic power...In these poems, corporate technology's relationship to control is not abstract or theoretical, but corporeal and gory."—Steven Zultanski, Frieze
"What happens when a poetics of 'the soft body' prompts a 'suite of vengeance poems'? What happens when participatory punks start blurring distinctions between being 'on stage' or 'in the crowd' at a poetry reading? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Andrea Abi-Karam"—Andy Fitch, BLARB
"Rendering an incisive critique on the violences embedded within the US military complex in the Middle East, EXTRATRANSMISSION asserts rapt resistance against the systems of oppression on every scale: from the rave to the riot, the OR to the orgy. The book insistently pulls out the wires that invisibly run through the circuitry of memory and experience, while sharply honoring the memories at every layer that tensionally compose one's own polyvocality."—Lix Z, Poetry Project Newsletter
"As Abi-Karam carves their polyvocal disaster-scape—addressing all from tech bros to PTSD survivors to horses to cyborgs, the poet's wide net of inclusion manages to highlight both the ubiquity and singularity of trauma."—Julie Mackay, Adroit
"anarchistic in their fervor."—Sahar Khraibani, Full Stop
Author Bio
Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma and delayed healing. Selected by Bhanu Khapil, Andrea's debut EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for publication in September 2021 at Nightboat Books. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are a leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA