4 weeks ago
Mia You with Obe Alkema
For this episode we are delighted to share with you an evening of readings by poets Mia You and Obe Alkema. They read from their latest poetry collections, respectively Festival and Bewogen selfies. The event took place at rile*books on February 14, 2025 in Brussels.
About Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025)
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.
About Bewogen selfies (het balanseer, 2024)
In Bewogen selfies, Obe Alkema investigates the relationship between landscape and memory. What does he find when returning to important places from his memory? What does he not remember, but Google does? Can a memoir be purveyed from his metadata?
About Mia You
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.
About Obe Alkema
Obe Alkema is a poet based in The Netherlands. He debuted with Obelisque (2018), a poetry glossy in millennial pink, followed up by another Obelisque in 2022. His 2024 publication Bewogen Selfies is a collection of memoirs about New York, poet Kevin Killian and New Narrative, sex and sexuality, Italy, depression and therapy, and much more. He regularly reviews poetry collections for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and works for the municipality of Utrecht.
Credits
Mixing by Ros Del Olmo
Introduction by Chloe Chignell