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.
Khadijah Queen is a multidisciplinary writer and visual artist. Queen is the author of six books, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her fifth book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), was praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as "quietly devastating" and "a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out." Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. The award included a full production at Theaterlab in New York City, directed by Fiona Templeton and performed by The Relationship theater company. A hybrid essay about the pandemic, "False Dawn," appeared in Harper's Magazine, was named a Notable Essay of 2020 in Best American Essays (HarperCollins 2021), and reprinted in the anthology Bigger Than Bravery (2023). Individual poems, interviews, and essays appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The Believer, Orion, Fence, Poetry, Yale Review, The Offing, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. In 2022, she was awarded a Disability Futures fellowship from United States Artists. A Cave Canem alum, she holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver and teaches creative writing, literature and poetics. A book of criticism is forthcoming in Spring 2025.
"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
"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
"Amongst all the static, Khadijah Queen manages to make some sense and beauty from the most arbitrary and insistent ways we allow ourselves to come undone." - Volta
