Black Peculiar

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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 navigates experience like a transparent filter feeder; common existence is sucked in and read from all angles that can be discovered all at once. I love how Khadijah Queen both insists on and secures sweet successes, using hybrid machinery made from salvage: remnants that survived something. In BLACK PECULIAR are the transformed and transforming outcomes and consequences of survival, outcomes and consequences that leave survivors so changed, they are often not recognizable as what they were, just hints here and there that supply a taste for the future, for moving on. In Queen’s book is some of the joy and necessity of what is bold enough to emerge strangely, beyond ability to be restrained with definitions.” —Thylias Moss

“In the 19th century, those unwilling to face the incongruities of a nation espousing freedom while simultaneously perpetuating terror used the phrase our peculiar institution as code for slavery. Here, with equal part precision and aplomb, humility and humor, erudition and absurdity, the work in Khadijah Queen’s BLACK PECULIAR decodes, uncovers, and recasts such lexical wound dressing, exposing the abraded, scarred flesh of a consciousness both beset upon and liberated through language. Unabashedly experimental, Queen continually bends form to the breaking point, reveling in the absence of authority revealed through hybrid genre: epistolary interrogations of a prismatic self; prose poems blurring narrative and parable; a wild verse play, whose lineage encompasses everything from Ubu Roi to Dutchman to The Vagina Monologues. ‘I unlocked my chorus of archetypal women from their chains,’ Queen tells us. ‘They rubbed their raw wrists with aloe and set to work.’ Would that we could all be subjects under one whose rule is so emancipatory.” —Noah Eli Gordon

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Author Bio

Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Black Goat / Akashic Books, 2008), BLACK PECULIAR (Noemi Press, 2011), which won the Noemi book award for poetry and was a finalist for the Gatewood Prize at Switchback Books; FEARFUL BELOVED (Argos Books, 2015), a hybrid collection framed by a letter to fear written during artist Ann Hamilton's Park Avenue Armory installation the event of a thread; and the narrative collection I'M SO FINE: A LIST OF FAMOUS MEN & WHAT I HAD ON (YesYes Books, 2017). Individual works appear in Fence, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Offing, jubilat, Tupelo Quarterly, Poor Claudia, Best American Nonrequired Reading, THE VOLTA BOOK OF POETS, Fire & Ink: A Social Action Anthology, THE FORCE OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE and widely in other journals and anthologies. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the low-residency Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University. She is also raising a teenager.

Author City: USA

Black Peculiar

Khadijah Queen

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