EXTRATRANSMISSION
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Award for Transgender Poetry!
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.
EXTRATRANSMISSION won the Kelsey Street 2017 Firsts! Book Contest, judged by Bhanu Kapil.
Praise
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
Press
“Widely Praised”—NBC OUT
“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.”
—Charles Theonia, Brooklyn Review
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
“What is a poet’s purpose in making change? Maybe it is merely one step toward a better world, but an important one. Collections like Abi-Karam’s yell at us until we make decisions and movements, until we decide to find a way to destroy the war machine.”
—Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Barrelhouse Magazine
“Andrea distills so much rage & anger into a most ferocious concentration in these poems. As read I could feel them placing a switchblade into my hand, showing me how to use it as “Kill Bro / Kill Cop” repeated in my mind.”
—Adelaide, East Bay Booksellers
“Oh. My. God. Andrea is the genderqueer cyborg of my dreams, probably of your dreams, and definitely of bros nightmares. This is their critique of nationalism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I went to sleep thinking of horse hooves and woke up thinking of how memory informs all I do.”
—Kyliemax, Pegasus Books
Aditi Machado featured an excerpt from EXTRATRANSMISSION in the January issue of Folder Mag
Davey Davis interviewed me for BOMB on vengeance poetics, kill bro poems, cyborg transformations as erotic experiences & implicating the self
Excerpt in The Poetry Project
Listen to my interview with the Queer Arab Podcast here
Listen to my interview on the Trans Poetry Waves Breaking Podcast here
Excerpts from EXTRATRANSMISSION in The Felt: Issue 4
Mention in Ms. Magazine “Poetry For the Rest of Us” by Dr. Karla Strand