In the Name of Scandal
Apr’20Poetry, Book, Performance Lecture
Kickstarter
In the Name of Scandal began as a raft. Written between 2019 and 2020 and launched through Kickstarter, it became a collection of poems on sluthood, queer migration, and spiritual exhaustion — a manual for surviving the postmodern collapse of sincerity. It sold over 100 copies and found readers in communities navigating faith, sexuality, and the fraught politics of self-display.
The book’s structure oscillates between theological tone and street vernacular. Each poem is a confrontation with the ways language both exposes and protects. To write “scandal” was to reclaim vulnerability as a technology, a means of producing presence. Shame became a muscle. The poem, a workout in being seen. The text’s emotional core lies in a poetic essay often read aloud in performance:
“Love as the tiny muscle at the base of each hair follicle
whose contraction causes the hair to stand on end.
Love as goosebumps.
A muscular reaction. Involuntary movement.
Like birth. The sliding against a wall of flesh.”
In this sense, In the Name of Scandal treats poetry as flesh, as the hand on your back when no other hand is there. It refuses the disembodied irony of contemporary language, insisting on tenderness as resistance. Formally, the work draws from traditions of hybrid writing: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, and Ocean Vuong’s performative lyricism. It pairs text with hand-drawn illustrations and collage fragments, merging eroticism, philosophy, and absurdity. Thematically, it stands at the intersection of confession and critique. It understands that exposure, like scandal, is not failure but fermentation. That to be scandalous is to still be alive. That love, even when perverted, remains the last raft we share when language and logic have failed.