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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.
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.