Madness Belongs to the People by Jody Chan

With gentle fervour and precise language that speaks to the nonverbal, the gestural, the sonic, Jody Chan’s third collection of poetry mobilizes the intimate, the historical, the revolutionary, and the mundane to confront the instrumentalization of disability as a surplus class. Chan’s multidisciplinary poems are a lyrical account of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist psychiatric survivor- and patient-led movements, from Germany to Japan.

Inspired by poets, artists, and activists like Frantz Fanon, Etel Adnan, and Solmaz Sharif, Chan’s prose and lyric poems delve into activist movements during World War II, the late 20th century, and the present day. This is an investigation of madness as resistance and political strategy. We experience “listening as a form of touch,” and the future as a change of form.

Praise for Madness Belongs to the People

“Like Tyehimba Jess’s Olio or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Jody Chan’s Madness Belongs to the People enlivens, with its interactive and interdisciplinary elements, the possibilities of what a book of poems can do and be. Taking madness as a series of guiding energies, formal possibilities, and generative constraints, these stirring, participatory poems are wise, layered, and full of gifts to such an extent I find myself finishing the collection eager, immediately, to reread them all. This erudite, passionate work evidences a deeply embodied politicization that understands, in relation to liberatory movements, both the powers and limits of language. Here are words that touch you, singing: ‘may language move you to action.'”—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat and bookseller at Open Books: A Poem Emporium

“Passing between the lyric, quotations, descriptions, notations, performances, calligraphies, and treatises, Chan deftly proves that ‘poetry is a way of organizing attunement.’ Here, we receive the gifts of that attunement with direct and remarkable clarity, always precise, never overwrought. Innovation, abundant throughout these poems, never exists for its own unfamiliar sake. It shows us how we might rely on each other, in all of our madness and resistance, opening up moments where though ‘devastating to admit it—I did not / feel alone.’ Madness Belongs to the People is a work of incisive, brilliant, and deeply necessary fact, unafraid to ‘sit somewhere / between noise and music’ and call comrades together. If in reading this book you find that, ‘for a moment, unforgivably, wrong [is] elsewhere,’ let that moment of respite light the fire in you that Chan so generously offers to stoke.”—Rob Macaisa Colgate, author of Hardly Creatures

“This book celebrates the madness of sound itself, how sound ‘resists mastery,’ ‘resists absorption into a narrative structure.’ Madness Belongs to the People is unscannable, liberatory in how it imposes attention, how every word is selected and positioned so deliberately that if your attention drifts, you are demanded back. What a joy to be pinned still by Chan’s poems. They impel, sit in, take over, they model courage for us, coach us, to say we are not too meek, we cannot comply with the state’s violences.”—Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes

“Madness Belongs to the People is a love letter to those of us who are mad, providing strategies of community care to disrupt capitalism’s state-sponsored, police-enforced version of madness and care. There are lessons on echolocation and echolalia from dolphin and human kin, taiko as emotional regulation system and call to action, and the collective form of the book—the chorus of citations from anticolonial scholars, poets, and activists, alongside histories of mad resistance—models how to care for one another.”—Mercedes Eng, author of Cop City Swagger