“Conduit, Khadijah Queen’s debut collection, is itself a current that runs through a historical and mythical past, continuing through our troubled present.

These stunning meditations… are called up out of the soil and already belong to us before we come to them. Her landscapes awaken from our unfolding ecological and anthropological devastations and serve as offerings to a conquered body that cannot be separated out from its own dwelling. There persists for Queen the ‘uncharted resilience’ of the body. The brilliance of these poems resides in their ability to accommodate the complexity and disappointments of events like Hurricane Katrina (‘The flood wide open—’) without denying the passage of time or the distances we hold before and after any moment in time...The beauty of the language and precision of the gaze transform into a spirit that remains present.”

- Claudia Rankine, from the Introduction, 2008