Jody Chan’s Book Notes music playlist for their poetry collection Madness Belongs to the People

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Jody Chan’s poetry collection Madness Belongs to the People is poignant and inventive in its use of language as both weapon against oppression and tool for understanding. Gabrielle Bates wrote of the book: “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…