Anodyne

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.

Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 08/18/2020
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781947793804


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 06/15/2020

About the Author
Queen, Khadijah: - Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit, Black Peculiar, Fearful Beloved, Non-Sequitur, and I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the CLMP Firecracker award in Fiction, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Colorado at Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the low-residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.