Festival

Mia You

Designed by the Rietlanden Women's Office and published by Belladonna* Collaborative

The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power.

This poetry collection views the migrant, female body as both the glorified and martyred totem of the festival-of-all-festivals we call globalization. Drawing from sources such as Sigmund Freud, James George Frazer, H.D., the Situationist International, seventeenth century narratives of Dutch sailors shipwrecked on the Korean peninsula, the rise of K-pop and the “Korean Wave,” and a zoo-breaking gorilla named Bokito, Festival features kaleidoscopic poetic sequences aiming to show that if anything universal is to be found in lyric poetry’s “I,” it is the result of centuries-long entanglements and contaminations, and of the bodies made to bear these exchanges, to give birth to this century’s globalized subject.

'Never holier than the spit-shined muck of what prowls between Nation and Man (in whichever order they invent themselves) Mia You is in infinite eye-roll, duh. While the Festival of Our Undoing proceeds, let’s at least have a good look; none of it seems to be bio-degradable, anywho. In the realm of elusive names, the collapsed arithmetic You practices unweaves the assigned—womanhologram motherhologram, (im)migranthologram/citizenhologram, teacherhologram, whatever—with pleasurable sardonicism, snaking about language(s), ’til what’s left is but spool; she swallows the thread, and pulls out the rear. Sharp: a psychological thriller that bleeds the fingers. If I laughed any harder, I’d never stop crying.' – S*an D. Henry-Smith