A review by houndgrrrl
Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

4.5

the following is the text of a little review-zine i wrote about this book of poetry. i honestly loved it so much (if you couldn't tell); it was invigorating, powerful, and so intriguing. it explored so much and took its time, but not too much time. it was urgent, and incredible. i love the collection of discussions being had.

anyway, enjoy if you read it! you can find the actual, full zine here: https://tehuan.neocities.org/zines-etc/villainy

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VILLAINY // SYSTEM MALFUNCTION - SURVIVAL STRATEGY

(a nonlinear zine-dispatch from the wreckage / on grief, lust, and resistance )

[ENTER: THE FIRST BLAST]

Andrea Abi-Karam doesn’t write poems– they write impact craters, detonating grief into the page. 

VILLAINY is a manual for survival written from inside the blast zone. It doesn’t just bleed—it wires that blood into the circuitry.

It is a howling, body-first, passion-laced rage– what happens when syntax collides with survival instinct, and the only way out is through.

body disassembled
target acquired.

VILLAINY doesn’t want to be read. It wants to be installed– like spyware in your bloodstream. It wants to crawl inside your mouth and rearrange your language until you stutter like a cyborg full of longing, revenge, and spit.

This isn’t poetry.

It’s surveillance footage, hacked and defaced.

It’s what grief looks like under occupation.

A post-9/11 techno-ritual.

A dirty love letter to your dead friends.

A syntax shredded by state violence, and still insisting on desire.

This is a collective mourning– run through a meat grinder, exsanguinated and spit back out again– because when your friends are dead, when the drones stay buzzing,

the body becomes haunted– yours, and not yours, all at once.

Survival becomes collective, and death becomes collective:

Autonomy is complicated when your friends are dead.

And so grief becomes a refusal.

And form must collapse.

[THIS GRIEF IS NOT ADMISSIBLE IN COURT]

The text loops. Stutters. Refuses to settle.

Every line is either a warning or a dare:

• Who are you when you're always being watched?
• What does grief taste like when it’s laced with tear gas?

Abi-Karam doesn’t mourn quietly.

Their grief doesn’t come with a podium or a folded flag.

It floods sidewalks. Shakes margins. Brands forearms.

This isn’t metaphor; it’s evidence.

Every line: a corrupted body cam.

A protest sign they didn’t live to carry.

This is not the grief of whiteness: 

it’s the grief that festers in brown trans bodies, refused a eulogy, and still beating.

Public. Anti-colonial. Brutal. Refusing to die quietly.

[LOVE AS INFRASTRUCTURE]

And still, there is love, tenderness:

Not in spite of the wreckage, but fueled by it.

There’s devotion here– tender, glitching, half-translated.

Love built in the margins, in spit, in static.

Love that says: I still want you. Even if they tried to shoot us apart.

Sex becomes mutual aid.

Touch becomes strategy.

The body becomes a sanctuary no state can legislate.

VILLAINY says:

I loved you. I still do. Even if they shot us apart.

And:

What does love mean when the target is always on your back?

[FORM = BREAKDOWN = STRATEGY]

Language as a weapon, as a wound.

Text as performance, as machine.

The form collapses on purpose–
 Abi-Karam turns grammar into debris.
 Sentences fragment, punctuation erodes,
 meaning slips, screams, recalibrates.

This isn’t just stylistic, this is survival coding.

Every fracture in syntax is a refusal to conform.

Every disruption in grammar is a refusal.

The lack of sentence structure becomes an aesthetic of resistance,

and Abi-Karam queers form itself– refusing containment, assimilation, or even clarity.

The book is structured like a networked breakdown: like a signal bouncing between bodies. 

It breaks the rules the way a protestor breaks a window:

not for chaos, but for air. For breath.

It infects your language processor,

and you understand it only once it’s already changed you.

[VILLAINY AS AN HONOR BADGE]

Abi-Karam takes the label of “villain” and licks it clean,

makes it into an armband, a prayer, a sex toy.

Because who gets called a villain in this country?

Melanin-filled bodies– transformed bodies–

bodies who fight back.

Ones who refuse to die quietly,

who mourn in public, organize in private,

burn, rebuild, fuck, & burn again: & on & on & on.

This isn’t a redemption arc. It’s a targeted transmission.

“i want to be the villain in your story if it means surviving mine.”

It’s not about being misunderstood.

It’s about being ungovernable.

Untranslated.

Unforgivable.

[CLOSING THE LOOP]

VILLAINY is not just a punk prayer.

It’s a field recording from the edge of collapse–

a logbook of resistance, still warm–

a techno-manifesto for those who weren’t meant to survive.

This is not analysis. This is a remix made from grief and adrenaline.

But survival is not the end: it’s the question.

What does VILLAINY leave behind in us?

What grief hasn’t healed, and shouldn’t?

What kind of world does this book dream of, even in fragments, even in flames?

Grief, love, form– none of them behave.

They churn, echo, refuse closure,

refuse to be sanitized.

Abi-Karam refuses to mourn quietly,

refuses to forget.

This is a risky transmission.

Let it teach you how to riot beautifully.

Let it break your syntax wide open.

Let it make you dangerous.

Each line is still ringing somewhere in the circuitry.

Each scream still running its loop.