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—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.
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches. Hedva's practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They collect knives. They garden. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition. They have an erotic relationship to meaning itself; and they describe their methodology as one of "hermeneutical mischief." 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. Whether the form is novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, videogames, installation, sculpture, drawings, or trickery, ultimately Hedva's work is different kinds of writing because it is different kinds of language embodied: it is words on a page, screaming in a room, dragging a hand through water.
Hedva is the author of four books, most recently the 2024 essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, published by Hillman Grad Books and Zando, which won the Amber Hollibaugh award for LGBTQ Social Justice writing, and was longlisted for a Goodreads Choice Award. They are the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a "hellraising, resplendent must read," and On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper's favorites of 2018.
"Purchase or thrash: '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 might: 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!" — CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
"Blood is spilled: 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
"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, author of Thresholes
"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 Hedva's 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, author of The Grave on the Wall
