Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture (Poets On Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Queen, Khadijah

Essays & Correspondence

University of Michigan Press

Radical Poetics

Ann Arbor : University Of Michigan Press

Transparently me...

Queen Khadijah

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran's Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Legacy Lit

"Khadijah Queen is a poet with stunning intellectual powers. It's a worthwhile experience to spend such quality time in an inaugural book of poems." --Eloise Klein Healy, former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles"CONDUIT, Khadijah Queen's debut collection, is itself a current that runs through a historical and mythical past, continuing through our troubled present. These stunning meditations...are called up out of the soil and already belong to us before we come to them." -- Claudia Rankine, author of CITIZEN, from the Introduction

Conduit (Black Goat)

Poetry

Akashic Books

Drama. Poetry. Winner of the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. NON- SEQUITUR presents a chorus of figures and objects carrying on apparently unrelated conversations in a shifting landscape of interiors. Of the play, 2013 Leslie Scalapino Award winner Joyelle McSweeney says, "Khadijah Queen's NON-SEQUITUR is the heir apparent to an avant-garde tradition running from the Futurist Sintesi through Lorca's Impossible Theater, through Black Arts to Suzan- Lori Parks. Smart, jagged, and irrepressible, it splits apart the compulsory coherencies of contemporary life to reveal the barbs and aggressions, fantasies and projections that keep society rolling on its dismal, oppressive track. Against such prerogatives, NON-SEQUITUR is an incandescent and welcome act of sabotage." "In this brief (as in a legal summation) Khadijah Queen revives the political absurdist experimentalism of Adrienne Kennedy, pushing drama to the limits of genre. Objects, ideas, and human body parts are driven to the same ontological plane, precisely the post-human condition in which we find ourselves: teetering at the boundaries of epistemology. NON-SEQUITUR is conceptual writing with concentrated vengeance; it bristles, trembling with a rage barely contained by Queen's laconic rhetoric and pin-point intelligence."—Tyrone Williams "Khadijah Queen's NON-SEQUITUR stages the deleted scenes and invisible screens infusing our social relations. Its evolving chorus explodes every imaginable form of address, every fraction of personal and public history until nothing of the illusion of neutrality remains. Each dissonant encounter invents a forum for another nest of questions. This nexus stings."—Eric Baus "Prodigiously populated theater energized by a rotating cast of intense who dis, who dat and whosoevers: 40% Discount, Morning Stubble, Habitual Justifier, the Charlie Horse Optimist, among others, who if we don't know by name we know them by their catastrophes and desperate hopes. Comedy and calamity spin briskly in the mix, trading lines in duets, trios and quartets. Attention, attention. This is the back of your mind, emerging full blown from a swallowed dream. Here."—Erica Hunt "Khadijah Queen's ingenious NON-SEQUITUR crashes the contemporary moment—a glut in bloated celebrity, wild brutality, status quo identity mongering. This cutting and finely attuned play features single-line- slinging speakers, often as object, artifact, consequence (i.e. THE BENT BUSINESS CARD, THE HAND-ME- DOWN PINKING SHEERS, THE BLONDE INSTITUTION) who/that 'can sense your violent thoughts.' Queen's complex manifestations of race, sex, and desire rearrange bodies and material lives where 'beauty behave[s] as a whip,' animating perception and perspective into an ever surprising mix of the theater of the absurd and a febrile cultural unconscious, replete with deleted scenes, characters, and contradiction as illumination, like when THE HAPPY SINGLE reports: 'I'm so ex-cited cuz I... ain't a-bout it, hey heeeeyyyyyy!'"—Ronaldo V. Wilson

Non-Sequitur

Dramas & Plays

Litmus Press

Poetry. African American Studies. BLACK PECULIAR sketches out power dynamics and faulty assumptions in terms of race and history, media and culture, and sex and gender in highly original lines of verse. An extraordinary mixture of wit and profundity, the three long works in the collection weave the personal and the political in both ruthless and tender ways. A fiction, a chorus, a leap into chaos, an unflinching love letter and a fierce indictment—BLACK PECULIAR collages observation and lived experience through a many-voiced "I" as flawed and complex and unusual as the mind of the artist in the world.

Black Peculiar

Noemi Press

Fiction. Young Adult Fiction. Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. Women's Studies. Hybrid Genre. Part 1980s and 1990s nostalgia, part exuberant storytelling, I'M SO FINE: A LIST OF FAMOUS MEN &amp; WHAT I HAD ON turns a sharply humorous magnifying glass onto gendered interactions in daily life, framed primarily by random celebrity encounters in Los Angeles. Far from a narrative of fame-chasing or conceit, however, I'M SO FINE breathlessly addresses what it means for a woman to fight for dignity and survival in an often hostile environment, to come into her own power as she decides what she wants for herself "&amp; mostly gets its every fineness." "I'M SO FINE is an accumulation that is the feminine memory that has had enough. This book is strength, is a critique, is subversive, is a woman, a fist, an lol, an F.U., a refusal, a gaze back at the gaze, is inevitable freedom wearing a flowered dress Kente cloth bomber jacket red lipstick white jeans a velvet choker white platform sandals a black turtleneck electric blue column dress an eggshell blouse with a high collar &amp; pearl buttons is wearing a powerful woman's body and mind."—Natalie Diaz

I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On

United States

YesYes Books

Poetry. African American Studies. The haunting, haunted world revealed in Khadijah Queen's FEARFUL BELOVED stays with the reader in an uncomfortably pleasurable way, and heightens awareness of our own world's deep horrors and ordinary brilliance. Anyone who has been unable to shake the erotic brutality of, say, Sylvia Plath's Ariel will savor the 'bruisable monuments' that Queen offers. Here Queen crafts a language that unfolds along multiple axes (spatial, temporal, emotional, spiritual) and is experimental with form while remaining seamless, precise, and vivid. Addressing Fear head-on--'your spectrality exists,' she insists--Queen's FEARFUL BELOVED evidences the fierce intelligence of 'a body in its own time, possessed of itself.'

Fearful Beloved

History & Criticism

Argos Books

Colorado Book Awards Finalist for Poetry Shortlisted for the Reading the West Poetry Book Award The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure--all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen's poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

Anodyne

Self-Help

Relationships

Tin House Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Queen, Khadijah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Queen, Khadijah