Khadijah Queen's second collection, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press Book Award.

"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."
-- 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. [...] 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."
-- Thylias Moss