“Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a large-hearted, compulsively readable memoir shot through with courage and razor-sharp intelligence. Moreover, Queen’s magnificent personal reckoning helps me to ponder what new forms of relation might be possible between ourselves, our nation, and the many institutions charged with stewarding the common good.”

“Khadijah Queen outdoes herself with captivating poems examining the dualities of joy and pain, love and loss, knowing and ignorance.”

“This is a powerful and dazzling collection, filled with wisdom and experience. Anyone who reads Anodyne will remember it for a long time.”

“I’m So Fine is an accumulation of the speaker’s seeming “chance” encounters with men, until K. Queen unzips these “chance” meetings to their bones exposing this: there is no “chance” no “un-intention” no “misunderstanding” when it comes to the language and gestures men are forever devising and revising against the female body’s sexualities and desires. This is an accumulation that is the feminine memory, that has had enough, that has disengaged from the old to create a new layering: the lines unbroken, the endless making as sweet as being out of the order other people like to think you are born to. This book is strength, is a critique, is subversive, is a woman, a fist, an lol, an F. U., a refusal, a gaze back at the gaze, is inevitable freedom wearing a flowered dress Kente cloth bomber jacket red lipstick white jeans a velvet choker white platform sandals a black turtleneck electric blue column dress an eggshell blouse with a high collar & pearl buttons is wearing a powerful woman’s body and mind.”

“The book is an investigation of celebrity culture and toxic masculinity that moves at a lyrical sprint, stuffed with characters and movements, with the ampersand often serving as the only available punctuation. We rush along with Queen, experiencing the world as she does, and wanting, like her, to desperately fight our way out of it.””

“Khadijah Queen’s ingenious Non-Sequitur crashes the contemporary moment—a glut in bloated celebrity, wild brutality, status quo identity mongering. This cutting and finely attuned play features single-line-slinging speakers, often as object, artifact, consequence (i.e. THE BENT BUSINESS CARD, THE HAND-ME-DOWN PINKING SHEERS, THE BLONDE INSTITUTION) who/that ‘can sense your violent thoughts.’ Queen’s complex manifestations of race, sex, and desire rearrange bodies and material lives where ‘beauty behave[s] as a whip,’ animating perception and perspective into an ever surprising mix of the theater of the absurd and a febrile cultural unconscious, replete with deleted scenes, characters, and contradiction as illumination, like when THE HAPPY SINGLE reports: ‘I’m so ex-cited cuz I…ain’t a-bout it, hey heeeeyyyyyy!”