On the eve of Justin Allen’s live reading to celebrate his debut book, Language Arts (2024), published by Wendy’s Subway, we gathered over tea at a boutique café on New York’s Lower East Side. Just a few blocks away, at Performance Space, the writer, artist, and musician would soon recite his poem “140 BPM”—a sonic reenactment of nights spent at Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club—in a deep, resonant bass, mirroring the frenetic energy of bodies moving to techno. Language Arts manages to capture that energy in a book, merging music, dance, performance, and language to capture the reverberations of sound off walls. All the while, he transforms thunderous lyrics into leftist critiques: “We don’t get paid / until next Friday and / our rent is due / tomorrow.”
Allen grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where he began performing after discovering tap and hip-hop dance in his adolescence, and having inherited his father’s diverse music tastes, which spanned Parliament-Funkadelic to Green Day’s Dookie. As a high schooler, he encountered experimental punk bands that pushed his musical boundaries, and found solace in the chaotic fever dreams of the Blood Brothers and in the loose expressive rhythms of Saetia, which draws on jazz.
Courtesy Wendy’s Subway
But it was Allen’s move to York City that would shape his political consciousness. In the city, the artist was immersed in the world of indie sleaze artists like Santigold and M.I.A. He found in their music a framework for critiquing the United States. “It was a weird moment when everyone was scared for different reasons,” he reflected. “Whenever people are scared, interesting things happen in culture.” In Language Arts, these “interesting things” take the form of text filled with sci-fi-inspired scenes, speculative essays, and “Hatnahans”—a language Allen created himself.
Creating a language is no small feat, but for Allen, it was second nature. An aspirational polyglot—having tried his tongue at French and Spanish—he discovered David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention (2015) at the Strand bookstore near Union Square. After studying indigenous African languages like Zulu and Xhosa on YouTube, he began to craft a language of his own. Hatnahans has open vowels, genderless words, and an invented alphabet.
But the ethos of Language Arts is as punk as it is academic. Lyrics and notes from his band, Black Boots, are scattered across fluorescent green pages, infusing the work with the irreverence of club culture. In his opening essay, “Into the City,” Allen presents a manifesto for the imaginary island of Hatnaha, blending urban life and nature in a vision of creative and ecological harmony. It conveys a sense of buoyancy, describing a luscious tropical climate surrounding a vibrant city center unspoiled by infrastructure issues and imperialism. Moving between these climes, at its core Language Arts creates a world as fluid as the languages we speak.