“Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved is an audacious gaze at the public and private spaces where we often fear, in our words and acts, to address the body of fear itself. Her poetry insists, as readers and bodies, that we must not look away from our own spines and mirrors… Here you will discover a language of marrow, brilliant and potent as bloodroot. Here, in Fearful Beloved, you will witness the velocity of Queen’s distinct voice, intense and profound in its survival.”
— Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Promise
Queen writing letters to fear that became part of Fearful Beloved, at Park Avenue Armory in 2011, as part of artist Ann Hamilton’s interactive installation an event of a thread.
Photo credit: Paul Octavious
“Fearful Beloved is a beautiful book, where the architecture of the house entangles with the architecture of the body to produce a language at once beguiling and strange, yet fused with the fiercest love.” — Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders and E! Entertainment
“The haunting, haunted world revealed in Khadijah Queen's FEARFUL BELOVED (Argos Books 2015) stays with the reader, 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. 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.’”— Abby Minor, Kenyon Review (June 2017)
Other reviews in BOMB Magazine * Boston Review * Publishers Weekly
