Fearful Beloved

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 as 'The song she sang as a little girl feeding ants.' 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.'