Mongrel Kampung

Mikael Johani

POETRY  |  $20

November 2024
Read an excerpt

safaristi

buat Edo

droning, skipping, chk-chk-chk-ing, you klip-klop dawns and discos, notwithstanding calamus and pitiful dragons, brandishing swords and falujas, quizzing folks on brixton, idm and vaka.

oozing black roses, you catapult pentatonic notes up to heaven, realizing just how much quizzing faiths sap your strength, how much quixotic flair it takes to swallow the moon.

ah ah ah yeah, anaemic beats aside, there’s peace in smashing heads, talking trash, mashing up samples in pitch darkness. finagle xanadu, jizz indiscriminately, quit meth. a vice grip infinitesimally.

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

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.

About the Author

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.

Praise

Jakarta does not deserve Mikael Johani’s anarchic genius. (Thankfully, neither does anywhere else.)

Joshua Ip

Mongrel Kampung starts as a polyglot firestorm. The astonishing "Aku Speaking Man" pulls the firestorm into a long painful zipper that opens into sad lyric. We find ourselves (at the end) quietly "entering a shop//only to exit/back into the shop." Trapped there, as we are. But reading Mikael Johani's explosive writing, I'm bounced out of the fucking shop for a minute. This writing is a kick and a kick in the teeth and I am grateful for it.

Catherine Wagner

This book brings the blood and knives of the ancients into our memoryless futures making our day whole with the moon inside of an eternity transformed by extension. It attends to appropriation rewoven and undone by simulacra. With the ‘dead neons’ of our livelihoods Mikael Johani joins Maria Sabina and Abya Yala through Anne Waldman and the Beats, he illuminates the loss of the Void of Georges Perec and what is not yet lost of Europe, and he drops a Google pin for Rimbaud through his horse’s eye in death. Even Mao here serves to question our reality as robotic with his own painful lessons. These writings are a ‘messy isthmus’, a ‘displacement as emplacement’, a Hendrix-like sound of freedom and being by association that brings us to the realization that ‘non-sequiturs eventually make sense.’ 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? and how does one become a person despite our trivialized plasticity? Here we find a staggering revelation, barely able to stand with intoxication from anaerobic alliances, and another Tropical Lung that we may inhabit without impingement as a heart of the world.

Roberto Harrison

Is Jakarta a city, a kampung, or a global cosmopolitan everywhere? Or is it a nowhere? Anywhere Mikael Johani wants to go in Mongrel Kampung, with its compulsively apt and playful associations, is where I want to go too. It matters that his Aku – his (lyric?) “I” - is timeless and/or “Like being in the right milieu/In the wrong century/Every time.” His poems have the comic pervasiveness of a cork knocked accidently into a bottle of wine. “How much quixotic flair it takes to swallow the moon” is a declaration not a question, and Johani has that much and more. He is promiscuous with languages—so enjoy the sounds of “a kind of private prayer” or bust out your translation app to find out that the promised land is untranslatable. Whatever you do, read, read, read this virtuoso performance of a collection.

E.J. McAdams, author of LAST


Praise for Previous Work

There’s an urgent sense of unraveling in the poems within Mikael Johani’s Catch Tiggers, Bette Midler. Like forgetting what you’ve packed in your bag and watching the contents spill out as you’re walking down the street. These poems are part-continental mystery, part-introspective conversations (with who? you’ll find out, or perhaps not) that carries the reader through cities, stories, conversations.

Jessica Ginting

Links

Interview with Vice Indonesia (English version archived in Wayback Machine)

Reading with the Brooklyn Rail

Poetry soundscape soundtrack with Edo Wallad for Jorgen Doyle’s video art “Bayangan Memudar/Faded Portraits”

Early versions of some Mongrel Kampung poems on Asymptote and The Johannesburg Review of Books

Comments as a co-judge of The 2021 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry

 

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-79-4
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 128 pp, 5.5 x 6.5 in
Publication Date: November 15 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)