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.

“FESTIVAL is an ode to both beauty and misery. Mia You’s ingenious poetry will have you laughing through your tears. Do NOT miss out!”
—Yael van der Wouden

"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 in The Brooklyn Rail

In Festival, Mia You showcases a sensory feast of consumer goods and detritus fluffed up with ambivalent merriment for latecomers to Empire’s party. Transnational in scope with axis points in the U.S, Korea, Netherlands, You’s work reveals the violent, colonial roots of both official celebrations and the family romance. Consisting of long narrative cycles and lyric punches, You’s poems are bodily and talky, brilliantly incisive, and alchemically transformative. You asks us to consider what makes up an event, a piece of time that is marked, contained, commemorated, and ritualized—as a form of mass dissociation. She then smashes the event (traumatic, difficult) and transforms it into something we can almost bear. 
—Vidhu Aggarwal

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

Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.

Photo by Wouter le Duc.