Fearful Beloved by Khadijah Queen


Fearful Beloved
Title : Fearful Beloved
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1938247205
ISBN-10 : 9781938247200
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 120
Publication : Published December 15, 2015

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 Reviews

  • Shawna

    One of the best and richest books I have savored in a while. Speechless.

  • sara

    i read it as a mood; and by "coronado" my heart was palpitating and i disassociated awhile; and in each "dear fear," i was present and felt it.

  • Tracy

    “If still standing, ask anyone who’ll listen though most aren’t—won’t: How do I look?” (26)
    .
    After Khadijah Queen read for the annual Cave Canem event a couple years ago, I drove her to the airport. We talked writing, and I mentioned struggling with form and writing about chronic illness. I hadn’t read FEARFUL BELOVED yet, so she recommended reading how she addressed fibromyalgia. I finally got my hands on a copy during quarantine. Her excavation of public and private spaces, address of fear, relationship redaction, language of bloodroot—
    o h m y g o d get this book and see genre split open.

    For fans of Tyehimba Jess, Kate Durbin, Jane Lewty, Lily Hoang.

  • Anatoly Molotkov

    "A poison has come over me. It is the kind that begins in/ the streets & ends in the belly. It is the kind that ends/ in the belly & begins again in the throat. It is the kind/ that swells the throat shut. There is no sea in the city." A complex, elegant study of fear from Khadijah Queen - moving, diverse and innovative.

  • Chaneli

    Queen uses various forms in this collection.
    letters to Fear, the feminine, the body, erasures, etc.
    a beautiful collection