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Minerva: The Miscarriage of the Brain
MINERVA THE MISCARRIAGE OF THE BRAIN collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of ON HELL, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems--in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form--Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labor of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light. With illustrations by Isabelle Albuquerque. "Purchase or 'genius.' Relocate an 'Ancient Greek text' to 'contemporary Los Angeles.' Does a geographical cure excrete ghosts, 'visions of strange bodies poised and moving,' or does it produce a 'deep, reverberating sound?' Johanna Hedva's MINERVA begins in this place and we go there, which is to say a reader does. Or float/trust this process of alchemical, pelvic, infinite, sub-maternal, and ceramic change."--Bhanu Kapil "Reverberations of this book outlast everything else in our ears, 'what felt like a skinned, feral cat breaching from my chest.' Definitely MINERVA, goddess of genius and poems! Celestial messenger Johanna Hedva gives up gold after the cult following of their book ON HELL. A (god)dess-sized reconstruction of the world we only thought we knew! Welcome home, poets!"--CA Conrad "Blood is the writer, the reader, the family, and the lovers are all brutally disemboweled. Abandonment, undeath, catharsis, and genius are all held to trial. Theatre, ritual, and memoir are cleaved open by sex, race, and the (mortal) body. MINERVA, as in all their writing, sets Hedva's astounding, somatic wisdom against an urgent, anarchistic wound. Let yourself belong to it."--Patrick Staff "Can an artist's personal history of their performances be a history of performance art? MINERVA THE MISCARRIAGE OF THE BRAIN traces both a decade of Johanna Hedva's performed works and the edges of that genre's bringing the intimate, fearful, feminine, traumatized, queer, and real-life-lived to look and admire and poke at the assumptions about what performance art has genius, unreachable, masculine, and hermetic. Hedva is both a wonderful writer in the school of Helene Cixous, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Clarice and like them, a creator of spaces we didn't know that we're allowed."--Alexandra Grant "This text is a trouble-maker. Well, that's not quite right. The trouble was already there, we were just trying to hang a tapestry over it, maybe shove it into the dirt of our potted plant. Hedva has that knack, though, for revealing, for turning something we'd rather keep silent into a beautiful wail."--Jessa Crispin "A book about viscera and black ash; 'Blood and guts... soul and tears.' Dark matter and sea foam blessed by 'the tentacles of sea plants when they move...' This is the literature of THE VOID. I will treasure MINERVA as I do the most revelatory writings of Artaud."--Lara Mimosa Montes "I have this fantasy that upon our deaths, we each are replaced with a museum. And that in the museum, is a record, in relics, of what we made, tried to make, failed to make, and what made us. Johanna Hedvas MINERVA affirms and animates this fantasy, overlapping rapturous corporeality with the posthumous archive. It is the nomination of a life's work of laying bare negative space by way of the nebulization of the body into a museum. (MINERVA, by the way, is the goddess of everything.)"--Brandon Shimoda Poetry. Fiction. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. Film. Music.
194 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2020
5 people are currently reading
353 people want to read
About the author
Johanna Hedva
19 books270 followersJohanna Hedva (yo-haw-nuh head-vuh) is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Ultimately, Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water.
Hedva is the author of the novel On Hell (2018), which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their next book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, essays, and performances that documents a decade of work from 2010-2020, will be published by Sming Sming and Wolfman in September 2020. Their first solo exhibition, God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, is open 20 June - 3 August 2020 at Klosterruine Berlin. Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Hedva has written about the political and mystical capacities of Nine Inch Nails, Sunn O))), and Lightning Bolt; the legacy of Susan Sontag; Ancient Greek tragedies; and the revolutionary potential of illness. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages, and their practice and activism toward accessibility, as outlined in their Disability Access Rider, has been influential across a wide range of fields.
Hedva is the author of the novel On Hell (2018), which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their next book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, essays, and performances that documents a decade of work from 2010-2020, will be published by Sming Sming and Wolfman in September 2020. Their first solo exhibition, God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, is open 20 June - 3 August 2020 at Klosterruine Berlin. Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Hedva has written about the political and mystical capacities of Nine Inch Nails, Sunn O))), and Lightning Bolt; the legacy of Susan Sontag; Ancient Greek tragedies; and the revolutionary potential of illness. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages, and their practice and activism toward accessibility, as outlined in their Disability Access Rider, has been influential across a wide range of fields.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 4, 2023
FANTASTIC. Review to come.
--
Well, two years later, I realized I never added this review! Here's the link, and a sample:
http://blog.carouselmagazine.ca/usere...
Minerva is a miscarriage. A refusal of duty. A stoppage of work; a foreclosure of labor. Amid the present-emptinesses scattered between performances and commentary rests recourse to the bodymind itself, tasked with reproducing conditions under which it struggles to survive. Here, too, Hedva turns to dreams, as well as to literary myth and speculative history, to make (non)sense of the embodied reality their doctor decrees: that Hedva “was unable to hold it, the thing, together / that is, [they] couldn’t carry [their child] the right way.” In their own recollection, Hedva cites their dreams of “wolves and elephant heads / [ … ] hands sprouted with tattoos / of long sentences in a language I didn’t know.”
Stitching a litany of M’s –– “moon, mother, magic,” myth and Madness –– Hedva makes space. These stories collect things unseen, as well as things purposefully, temporarily obfuscated –– after all, “for how to disappear / completely and then return, [Hedva has] had the best teachers.” They reimagine giving birth in an ancient cave, attended-to by an anonymous man to whom they speak only in “blood, tissue, dirt, and fluids.” Yet they are also a gender in the body of a mermaid, who neither lays eggs nor has “a little vagina somewhere on her green tail.” Hedva’s mermaids eat sperm, contain the sea, lay dying eggs. In this retooling, the mermaid is a beast, “but beasts are mothers too” –– mothers who refuse to carry.
I ask, after Hedva: How long have we carried our selves, our burdens, our husbands and homes, and have we found a place to set them down? Have we been made / to burden? This is a question to which there is no answer. Instead, Minerva makes one final refusal, this time to the circumstances of their own existence: they did not spring from their father’s head or their mother’s stomach, but from the twisted, attic-bound legacy of Madwomen-passed.
--
Well, two years later, I realized I never added this review! Here's the link, and a sample:
http://blog.carouselmagazine.ca/usere...
Minerva is a miscarriage. A refusal of duty. A stoppage of work; a foreclosure of labor. Amid the present-emptinesses scattered between performances and commentary rests recourse to the bodymind itself, tasked with reproducing conditions under which it struggles to survive. Here, too, Hedva turns to dreams, as well as to literary myth and speculative history, to make (non)sense of the embodied reality their doctor decrees: that Hedva “was unable to hold it, the thing, together / that is, [they] couldn’t carry [their child] the right way.” In their own recollection, Hedva cites their dreams of “wolves and elephant heads / [ … ] hands sprouted with tattoos / of long sentences in a language I didn’t know.”
Stitching a litany of M’s –– “moon, mother, magic,” myth and Madness –– Hedva makes space. These stories collect things unseen, as well as things purposefully, temporarily obfuscated –– after all, “for how to disappear / completely and then return, [Hedva has] had the best teachers.” They reimagine giving birth in an ancient cave, attended-to by an anonymous man to whom they speak only in “blood, tissue, dirt, and fluids.” Yet they are also a gender in the body of a mermaid, who neither lays eggs nor has “a little vagina somewhere on her green tail.” Hedva’s mermaids eat sperm, contain the sea, lay dying eggs. In this retooling, the mermaid is a beast, “but beasts are mothers too” –– mothers who refuse to carry.
I ask, after Hedva: How long have we carried our selves, our burdens, our husbands and homes, and have we found a place to set them down? Have we been made / to burden? This is a question to which there is no answer. Instead, Minerva makes one final refusal, this time to the circumstances of their own existence: they did not spring from their father’s head or their mother’s stomach, but from the twisted, attic-bound legacy of Madwomen-passed.
March 19, 2021
CA-Conrad wrote 'A (god)dess-sized reconstruction of the world we only thought we knew! Welcome home poets!'
I was home, and revisited, and revisited, and revisited.
I was home, and revisited, and revisited, and revisited.
May 14, 2021
Five stars are not even enough for this book! Haven’t had such an intense reading experience for a very long time
March 21, 2023
some of this is definitely going over my head, though the afterword was really helpful. the third part that deals with misogyny most directly was like. ugh. hit so deep.
March 4, 2023
This is a book that you feel and experience more than you read.
Read
January 4, 2022This book was an interesting read showcasing the development of a young playwright. The photographic elements adds a whole new layer to this personal autobiography of the different plays. I also enjoy the poetry elements as well. Would definitely recommend to any theater or young playwrights out there.
April 23, 2021
literally brilliant, thats it
February 18, 2022
a perfect, blistering exorcism!!!!!!!!
have not felt so gut punched by a book in forever
have not felt so gut punched by a book in forever
October 16, 2023
Devoured this book in one day. Wonderful!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews