Excessive Juice

EXCESSIVE JUICE is a collection of poetry that interrogates the simultaneously absurd and harrowing reality of hate in the United States of America- hate that has existed since its imperialist inception but has been recently galvanized by the statements and policies of its 45th president and his supporters. Wading through racism and sexism, the speaker's foreign, Korean body acts as a canvas for tattooing dialogue between different selves, imaginary and processed but no less real. The raging self, the hurt self, the presidential self, the Korean self all mingle and multiply, often under the deception and deceit of the binary or ternary text alignments where voices talk at and through each other. Food and digestion serves not as comfort or nourishment, but as a primary method for (mis)communication and contamination in exchanges that weigh the speaker against what the president represents or compare the realities of queerphobia and misogyny between the US and Korea, raising a question towards American exceptionalism and Korean nationalism. Popular culture and Internet memes come and go throughout the poems, the currencies that Americans negotiate with to protest, support, or forget the damage being caused by the administration towards non-white, non-cis males. The first part introduces the speaker slowly being displaced as hate fills up their being and starts a chemical reaction with their previous understanding of the world. The second part addresses the sickness dwelling in the speaker’s body sloshing about and spilling when the looming figure of the president overstays his welcome and causes it to overflow. The damage of hate on a depressed body, whether direct or indirect, leads to a regurgitation that threatens to be indecent and uncivil.