Anodyne by Khadijah Queen (Tin House Books, paperback)
Publication Date: August 18, 2020
Publisher Marketing: 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." All of which builds an affective and luminous sense of record, of observing and perceiving. The poems speak to "How we fail is how we continue" and 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 into an eye-wide and powerfully-deep poetry collection.--Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence
