“Khadijah Queen’s poems are fire and sacred song.

From heart-stopping familial narratives—a son awash in sadness, an aging mother’s boulder-smiting love, a brother turned to dust by a bullet—to formal inventiveness and experimentation, this is writing that makes the hardship of being alive transcendent.These poems swirl the pain of our lives with a neon kind of sweetness. Queen’s writing endures the revolt of the body with verbal play and a powerful, radical vulnerability. Anodyne is urgent and fragile, manifesting the beautiful danger in being alive.”   —Alex Lemon, author of Another Last Day and Feverland: A Memoir in Shards

Interview with Talia Schlanger for CBC Radio’s q. August 14, 2020

“Anodyne captivates with poignant, resilient poems; ones that face toughness with lucidity: of losing family and facing landscapes full of “untended loveliness of the forsaken”... The poems construct insight with breathtaking momentum through frank, sonorous, and delicate diction; furthermore, the poems carry forth an analysis from the person to the systemic, recognizing and remembering "when pain was not to be seen or looked at, / but institutionalized. Invisible, unspoken, / transformed but not really transformed.” The poems are full of a vital and recuperative prosody: erasures, odes, synesthetic centers; Queen’s commanding style: building the poetic edges that are laced with endeavors, hurdles, grace, and truth.” —Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence

Winner, William Carlos Williams Book Award, Poetry Society of America

Colorado Book Award Finalist

IndieNext List

“Every poem in Anodyne reminds me what a poem can do, what a poem should do, in how it gets to the details of personhood by attending so gorgeously to the details of the world.” — Langa Chinyoka, The Paris Review Daily

"We expect poetry to do specific things, to perform a certain way. We want it to bend. To conform. To understand itself for us, so to speak, so that we, the readers, are clear. Frequently, we forget that poetry is a hard and intentional work that must be itself... Other reviewers have spoken to the collection’s strengths — its cleverness, its lyricality, the depth of its feminist introspection. I would like to add...that Queen’s poetry...has something important to say."

— Monique Ferrell, Bellevue Literary Review

“‘It feels strange to smile in a fascist era,’ Khadijah Queen writes. Indeed. Are you listening, reader?

I recommend this book to anyone who ever had a child or a parent, who ever had a body or loved, to anyone who was ever sick or tried to sleep a good night's sleep, and failed, and tried again. All of this is to say: This book will give music to your attempts, it will give meaning to your nights and days… This is a powerful and dazzling collection.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Khadijah Queen’s newest collection, Anodyne, is a study of form & cavedwell, feminism as foresight, and archives the articulation of black excellence & resilience… She shapes each poem to the sound of a hand, photograph, fractured reflection and a throat. Anodyne as a noun is a painkilling medicine. These poems are a painkilling medicine. They provoke, incite and steer steady as scripture.”

—Mahogany L. Browne, author of Black Girl Magic and Chlorine Sky

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