Overview

The poems of Mikael Johani’s second collection Mongrel Kampung are mixed, mutated utterances of a heteroglossic headspace, a home at once familiar and foreign, backwards and forwards, I and another. Sometimes a poem is in English but refers to a world in which English is never spoken. It may contain a phrase in Javanese or Greek or Arabic or Aussie, but is intended for an audience who will never understand what it means. It may retell a dialogue in multiple languages, but in the poet’s hands all languages blur into one language. These poems are translingual mini-tomes—tirades, historiographic treatises, love letters, protest songs, errant tweet threads. The spritz, spritz of cosmopolitan intimacies sprayed from an heirloom perfume atomizer beside an open sewer. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus cap tikus.

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“Whatever you do, read, read, read this virtuoso performance of a collection.” E.J. McAdams, author of LAST “Jakarta does not deserve Mikael Johani’s anarchic genius. (Thankfully, neither does anywhere else.)” Joshua Ip “Wide in its range and deathless in its attention to the instant without interface, here we find the answers to some of our primary questions: how do we return to the center of now?” Roberto Harrison

Author Information

Mikael Johani’s first book of poetry, We Are Nowhere And It’s Wow, was published by Post Press. His poems, translations, and essays were published in to let the light in, Poems by Sunday, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Book of Jakarta, #UntitledThree, On Relationships, Asymptote, The Johannesburg Review of Books, AJAR, Vice, Kerja Tangan, Popteori, and others. He was a writer-in-residence in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) programme in 2022. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he organises the monthly spoken word night Paviliun Puisi.

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