FESTIVAL by Mia You

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.

"She reanimates the form-of-life which is a poem with a feminist skepticism, without foreclosing her robustly idealist commitment to poetry’s continuance"
—Lisa Robertson

Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2024), I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and the chapbook Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Other writing has appeared in Artforum, Los Angeles Review of Books and The European Review of Books, as well as ELH and Textual Practice. She currently teaches at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. She is also working on a three-year Dutch Research Council-funded project titled Poetry in the Age of Global English.