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Articles by Khadijah Queen
Black Women Writers at Work in the 21st Century
Description In the tradition of Claudia Tate’s classic book, reenvisioned for the twenty-first century, Khadijah Queen showcases fifteen leading Black women writers who are influencing our cultural and literary future. Like the luminaries Tate interviewed forty years ago, the writers in this collection demonstrate how their identities are integral to their creative processes in craft, thought, and imagination.
Silence Comes from Somewhere Else
Find and share the perfect poems. translated from the Macedonian by the author When at evening I hear the voice of my dead mother, I summon deer to my side— they who understand all the languages of fear without saying a word. I would invite them into the courtyard of quiet changes and ask them about the sins of the unborn, about the distance between the blood of two enemies after the war. I would ask them to lock the silence— secret of the open eyes.
Dragon Back
After my limbs retreat into their sockets again, my spine slips its discs back into pain’s fist until all I can do is double, cry, or call for help to move. Residue lines up under compression. To distract myself I watch travel shows—countries I’ve already explored, learning more about the contexts of my Côte d’Azur memories. Feels like hitting refresh, like keeping good thoughts crisp despite the reek of bad thoughts crowding in.
Another Eclipse Poem
A PBS documentary tells me two thousand years ago in Babylon astronomers notched eighteen years of eclipse repetition in cuneiform. They’d discovered what Edmond Halley named the saros cycle— measuring time without place. To calculate path, Halley tracked the moon’s 17th-century orbit numbers, came within four minutes & twenty miles & now: we know within seconds where darkness will fall, & when—a dance of knowledge & perseverance. Saros—according to the Suda, a Byzantine measure, a Chaldean number.
Honest of veteran's memoir will stun readers
Keep your head down. Stay steady, mind your business and don’t compare yourself to others. You are where you are for a reason, don’t lose sight of it. There’s a prize at the end, and endurance is the only way to get it. You have a job to do and, as in the new memoir “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” by Khadijah Queen, you’ll do it until you can’t. kAmz925:;29 "F66? 92E65 x?<DE6C[ |:49:82?]k^Am kAm$96 925 368865 E@ DE2J :?
THE BOOKWORM SEZ: Black Navy vet recounts her story
Keep your head down. Stay steady, mind your business and don’t compare yourself to others. You are where you are for a reason, don’t lose sight of it. There’s a prize at the end, and endurance is the only way to get it. You have a job to do and, as in the new memoir “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” by Khadijah Queen, you’ll do it until you can’t. kAmz925:;29 "F66? 92E65 x?<DE6C[ |:49:82?]k^Am kAm$96 925 368865 E@ DE2J :?
Khadijah Queen on What It’s Like to Write Poetry on a Naval Destroyer
“I’d steal a moment to write future me into existence, or to write my way through my feelings after another tedious day.” As I settled into the routine of a bonafide sailor, I discovered my way of interacting socially didn’t match that of my shipmates. After a rather wild social time during my training in San Diego, I wanted ship life to feel more like a workplace. I had ambition and wanted to do things right.
Khadijah Queen on the Value of Intimacy and Self-Care for Someone on the Asexual Spectrum
In my desperation to get some real sleep for the first time since January 2020, I said yes when, in October of that year, my acupuncturist asked if I wanted her to get rid of my “false steam.” She asked if I was sure, and I said yes, again. Care is a kind of intimacy. A layer of knowing that involves exchange and trust and consent. For me, a person on the asexual spectrum, intimacy has nothing to do with sex or romance.
New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón
By ADAM CLAY, KHADIJAH QUEEN, ROGER REEVES, ANALICIA SOTELO, and RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ To kick off Poetry Month we’re bringing you selections from Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s new anthology, You Are Here, out this month from Milkweed Editions. As part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” 24th US Poet Laureate Ada Limón has commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world.
The Future of Poetry — Triangle House
Mess, chaos, and disorganization in life and in our work can create anxiety, confusion, missed deadlines, outright rejection from others, and many other negative consequences. My mind, however, is naturally chaotic because I am—I learned, at age forty-six—neurodivergent. Finally! I know the reason why people called me “too sensitive” and “too literal” all my life.
Khadijah Queen: "The Repetition of the Wound"
Arezzo, 2023 Sanctifies the sacrifice in the bodies of saints, makes holy the suffering, passes down the conviction that pain is life, and God approves, and we look to men as confirmation.
Season of Grief
Find and share the perfect poems. My grandmother sat at the head of her oak table one Labor Day afternoon & in a lull turned to me & said all the people I knew are dead. When she fixed those two words, I knew, I felt my heart in the world beat its blood through thin chambers. The constant rush still interrupts the body I didn’t make, but keep breathing somehow & functioning until I can’t, & the night before she died, I felt the easing of her spirit, & the same when my aunt died the year before.
Black Peculiar by Khadijah Queen
Home / Catalog / Poetry Series / Black Peculiar Category Poetry Series Publication 2012 ISBN 978-1-934819-20-3 Format Paperback $15.00 In stock Black Peculiar quantity Blurbs 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.
Landmarks - Boulder Weekly
Caitlin Rockett Editor’s note: Former CU Boulder assistant professor Khadijah Queen read this original poem at the March 25 Fairview High School vigil for the victims of the King Soopers shooting. With Queen’s permission, we are publishing the poem in honor of the one-year anniversary of the shooting.
Not Once by Sharon Olds - Poems
A funeral home before the funeral. The ghosts it despises. Evaporated holy water. Messiah of satin roses. The prayer before it becomes a prayer: in the throat, the machine for lamenting. * Musk of kindling after fire. Char, as in: these hands are reaching, but all they can grasp is air. The road the hearse used to carry the body to the wormhole. A sling carrying a body with broken clocks. Taproot. * My mother in her mainframe, captive to pumps, pipes, irrigation tubes.
American Life in Poetry Original
2021 American Life in Poetry editor KWAME DAWES More and more, poets, like everyone else, are confronted with the news and physical evidence of change in our weather patterns and landscapes, and we find ourselves trying to find language for this unsettling sense that the world is changing rapidly.
Undoing by Khadijah Queen
Column 878 01.17.2022 More and more, poets, like everyone else, are confronted with the news and physical evidence of change in our weather patterns and landscapes, and we find ourselves trying to find language for this unsettling sense that the world is changing rapidly.
Craft Capsule: Poets’ Prose
This is no. 87 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule. The process of writing prose can intimidate even the most seasoned poets. But we should view our training in poetry as an advantage rather than a drawback. Lately, with all that’s happening in the world, I’ve actually found it easier to write prose than poetry.
Craft Capsule: Rethinking Theory and Poetics
This is no. 85 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule. I entered my English PhD program in the fall of 2016 knowing that I wanted to write criticism—I felt excited to dive into prose and formally shape what I had learned about reading and writing literature over the course of nearly two decades. I wasn’t as excited about theory.
Craft Capsule: Creating a Seasonal Writing Practice
This is no. 84 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule. The pandemic, social uprisings, and a volatile political climate—superimposed upon family and work responsibilities, as well as health challenges—has made a regular writing practice impossible over the past ten months. Essays I pitched early in the year didn’t materialize, and only a handful of terribly sad poems arrived in usable condition.
Black Talk, Black Feeling with The Believer
To view this event, go to: https://www.pdxbookfest.org/daily-live-stream/ If you have not done so already, you will need to register for a free account at pdxbookfest.org so you are able to access all of our free Portland Book Festival events, including this one. You only need to register once to have access to all free festival events. Black Talk, Black Feeling is a conversation series inspired by the ethos of Nikki Giovanni’s foundational poetry book Black Feeling, Black Talk.
Karen Russell has recommended reading for you, Joe Biden.
Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them. This week, we spoke to Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Sleep Donation, Karen Russell. * Book Marks: First book you remember loving? Karen Russell: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle BM: Favorite re-read? KR: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn BM: What book do you think your book is most in conversation with?
COVID-era lessons from homeschool
Don’t be terrified. Be ready. Khadijah Queen Essay Sept. 15, 2020 From the print edition Like Tweet Email Print Subscribe Donate Now It’s fall, and schools are only partly open, while many parents are still working from home. And that means the possibility of homeschooling. If you’re hearing a horror movie soundtrack right now, that’s OK! Teaching from home can be a terrifying undertaking.
Two Poems by Khadijah Queen
“Ode to 180 Pairs of White Gloves” smacking that ass making a phat beat (the thinking man’s Beyoncé endlessly sketching Isaach de Bankolé) O hair as urgent bulletin cosmic drifts of hair emitting important information O untapped talents and salted bravado a syntactic turn-on a paragraphic chasm stirring up hallucinogenic invader magic resembling a hoarded apocalypse of fetishized resistance against a corridor of wounds O honeypot hand in a real busy honeycomb watching the bees suck on brown...
[Podcast] False Dawn, with Khadijah Queen
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August 2020 Issue | Harper's Magazine
[Harper’s Index] Factor by which the Minneapolis police used force more often against black people than white people over the past five years : 7 Share [Harper’s Index] Portion of Americans who would be comfortable with the military being deployed to their community in response to protests : 2/5 Share [Findings] The decreasing transpiration of plants, a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, was partly to blame for recent heat waves in northern latitudes.
False Dawn, by Khadijah Queen
1. I collect living things at the end of their lives. Faint, failed. Gift of a rose half-bloomed before having enough. Dried lilac pressed between high-shelved Lispector volume and Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness. Late-summer pine cone brushing the spine of Lucille Clifton’s Collected. Snapped from the vine to save the others—a yellowed philodendron leaf. Was it the lavender incense I burned the nights I couldn’t sleep? Did I make a mistake leaving it in water so long?
LIVE ON ZOOM: POETRY NIGHT with JENNY ZHANG, TOMMY PICO, MORGAN PARKER & KHADIJAH QUEEN
Join us for the best reading in all of time and space, featuring the poets of Tin House: Jenny Zhang, Tommy Pico, Morgan Parker and Khadijah Queen! Please register on Eventbrite to get the Meeting ID and password. Please note: this event will be recorded. Audio from the event will be posted to Skylight Books podcast page. Subscribe on iTunes or listen on Spotify.
Infinite Constellations
Description Praise A gathering of innovative, speculative fictions by writers of color, both established and emerging The innovative fictions in Infinite Constellations showcase the voices and visions of 30 remarkable writers, both new and established, from the global majority: Native American/First Nation writers, South Asian writers, East Asian writers, Black American writers, Latinx writers, and Caribbean and Middle Eastern writers.
Opinion | ‘We Will Not Be Exorcised’
disability Poets have always been writing while disabled. Here is new work by seven of them. By Khadijah Queen and Jillian Weise Ms. Queen and Dr. Weise are poets. Jun 15, 2019 Image Bobby Tirelli (b. 1958), “Untitled”, colored pencil. Descriptive caption: A complex, exuberantly colored drawing filled with geometric shapes, diagonal stripes, checkerboard planes and mathematical notations. Tirelli grew up in a small southwestern Italian neighborhood in Chicago. He joined Project Onward in 2013.
Opinion | ‘Make No Apologies for Yourself’
disability Are we writing for other disabled people, for the nondisabled, or for everyone? The work of these poets speaks for itself. By Khadijah Queen and Jillian Weise Ms. Queen and Dr. Weise are poets. May 19, 2019 Image Sheila Smith, “Untitled” (2017), acrylic on canvas. Descriptive caption: An abstract landscape painted in broad strokes of blue, orange, red, with strings of floating dots in the foreground. Sheila Smith was born and raised in Patterson, Arkansas.
National Poetry Month Day 4: Khadijah Queen
National Poetry Month Day 4: Khadijah Queen I dreamt you at the Tate Leaned forward on a long bench, long legs taking up the whole sleek area Drawing your own sneakers & eating a tuna melt cut in half After you offered me that 50% I took out my own giant sketch pad & we switched— size 14 men’s & size 7.5 women’s, archival Who cares about matching The dream occurred on a plane traveling north from Phoenix to Denver & now carouseling slow is my neutral hardside & Sade, through Bluetooth,...
64 Dimensions* | The Offing
Photo by Lou Levit 1. e4 They claim it began with Adam, some sentient man born haunted by inner systems. The design of blood, bone; arranged to perish. The mind, made into doors ajar for ghosts, shamans, bewilderment. “I survive,” to mean: inventing power is something of a curse. 1. …e5 The roads beneath us were for slaves, I’m told. A blackness permitted to space without geography. If not this America, flee into other ones below it.
If gold, your figure as mirror on the ground is by… | Poetry Magazine
After Alejandra Pizarnik, after Fernando Pessoa Comic screen to change what came to notice Even though sky at first was the same blank slate So literal.
American Poetry Review - Khadijah Queen - "The world says not to expect the world"
But do it anyway— be made, all out of love— taken, bestowed, lived through, by means of, without beauty we don't want to waste & the world says it wants, but trashes, sees as glut, usable in a finite manner We like talk of human forevers as holes in us unfilled, we're raggedy apartments Who to blame deluxe in schism—runaways & orchids tattooed on wrists or thighs As dull men scoff we still say keep fighting, & love me again— don't the pines die, too & exactly with our names...
quantum distributions for Sarah Baartman
L'éclipse totale de soleil en 1999 faite en France © 1999 Luc Viatour “Baartman lived in poverty, and died in Paris of an undetermined inflammatory disease in December 1815. After her death, Cuvier dissected her body, and displayed her remains.
Supernova | The Offing
Courtesy of Creative Commons CC0 The little boy I babysit loves Hot Wheels and Zoids, keeps a dusty Nerf gun under his bed. He prefers K’NEX to LEGOs, has knobby knees and gapped teeth, red-brown skin like me. In his room there’s a telescope by the window where his brother’s bed used to be. At night we sit there, necks bent, eyes to the glass. He just started fifth grade, so there’s a star in the galaxy for every question he asks me: Was the Big Bang real? Are aliens real?
Small Press Distribution
We at SPD are so proud to carry some of the best African American, small press literature around. From insurrectionist to empathetic, uncompromising to beautiful, we celebrate all of it this month along with our incredible authors - and remain ever-grateful for this crucial work.
Our Top 25 Poems of 2017
As we gather our most-read poems of the year, we would like to think that the simple fact that you have clicked and arrived here, where poems are, bespeaks a collective resilience. The presence of readers of these remarkable poems, our honor to publish, buoys and sustains the work we are trying to do on the poetry pages of Boston Review.
How We Hold The Dead
Sly sly sly! In threes, always. She thinks, sly sly sly! At the video streaming out in front and within her. Here the movement of bodies on boards, on bikes, on air with parachutes yanking out behind them. Bike the coastal rode, bike the dirt womp, bike the mountain crush. Run the asphalt and scaddle rock clifferies. Sly sly sly, She says and knows She’s got the words wrong again. Wrong, off, and slump-like.
Manifesto
Mar 14, 2017 Image: Emily Bell Make a mountain out of every molehill. Roll up dirt the way a kid gathers snow around itself to make a man, but skip the coal, coal in mountains a major reason molehills must make do, Make a mountain out of every molehill. Roll up dirt the way a kid gathers snow around itself to make a man, but skip the coal, coal in mountains a major reason molehills must make do, or if you’re the mittened kid, don’t make your man look fixedly at what happens to our summits.
From I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men &What I Had On
Khadijah Queen is the author of five books, including I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, forthcoming from YesYes Books in spring 2017. She teaches in the low residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.
A Hashtag, A Movement, A State of Mind
“We ain’t big enough to do it by ourselves.” – Mrs.
I HAVE QUESTIONS
"Meriam and her Niece" by Graham Crumb © 2010 “Terrorist acts are both the exorbitant mirror of its own violence and the model of a symbolic violence forbidden to it, the only violence it cannot exert – that of its own death.” – Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism” If Baudrillard is right, then when it comes to Black Americans being killed by police, can police forces across America be considered terrorist organizations?
Prague by Khadijah Queen - Poems
Yes as thievery, except if saved for a fantasy in which I in a backless dress encounter you on a typical balcony overlooking Vltava, gripping the latticework, metal, a barrier to leaping into an esoteric night, fixed and ornate enough, like my penchant for the infinite within the singular, encounter you as tributary, serpentine, the heat of your fingers on my spine, my head turning as you bend to catch the yes I'd held latent, a mine you trigger with your tongue, neither of us mean to stop...
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