Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 96 pages
March 15, 2017, ISBN 978-1-936919-46-8
I’m So Fine is an accumulation that is the feminine memory that has had enough. This book is strength, is a critique, is subversive, is a woman, a fist, an lol, an F.U., a refusal, a gaze back at the gaze, is inevitable freedom wearing a flowered dress Kente cloth bomber jacket red lipstick white jeans a velvet choker white platform sandals a black turtleneck electric blue column dress an eggshell blouse with a high collar & pearl buttons is wearing a powerful woman’s body and mind.
-Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was an Aztec
Khadijah Queen’s fearless new collection, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, is equal parts illuminating and disconcerting, much like the celebrity cultures and patriarchal systems the book critiques. These always stylish, quick-witted pieces serve as a pop culture archive—of almost forgotten R&B singers and A-list movie stars, rappers and comedians—while breaking down fame in all of its glittery, corporation-supported entitlement. By offering us a sophisticated new lens through which we might view self-actualization, Queen reframes our understandings of gender and notoriety.
—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke
I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On by Khadijah Queen
About I'm So Fine
Included in U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s feature, "6 Recent Collections that Deliver Truth with Originality and Grace" in O, The Oprah Magazine, April 2018
Finalist, CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, 2018
Finalist, American Book Fest Best Book Award in Fiction, 2018
Finalist, Balcones Poetry Prize, 2017
Longlist, Julie Suk Award, 2018
I’d give this book to the young women in my life. I’d get this book in middle and high school libraries. Like the title suggests, we women are fine, as in gorgeous, as in valuable, as in fuck you to anyone who says otherwise.
“The book is an investigation of celebrity culture and toxic masculinity that moves at a lyrical sprint, stuffed with characters and movements, with the ampersand often serving as the only available punctuation. We rush along with Queen, experiencing the world as she does, and wanting, like her, to desperately fight our way out of it.”
— Hanif Abdurraqib for The New Yorker
Part 1980s and 1990s nostalgia, part exuberant storytelling, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On turns a sharply humorous magnifying glass onto gendered interactions in daily life, framed primarily by random celebrity encounters in Los Angeles. Far from a narrative of fame-chasing or conceit, however, I'm So Fine breathlessly addresses what it means for a woman to fight for dignity and survival in an often hostile environment, to come into her own power as she decides what she wants for herself "& mostly gets its every fineness."
About Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Black Goat / Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), which won the Noemi book award for poetry and was a finalist for the Gatewood Prize at Switchback Books; Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015), a hybrid collection framed by a letter to fear written during artist Ann Hamilton’s Park Avenue Armory installation the event of a thread; and the narrative collection I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017). Individual works appear in Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit, Black Peculiar, (which won the Noemi book award for poetry and was a finalist for the Gatewood Prize at Switchback Books), Fearful Beloved, and the narrative collection I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Work has appeared in Fence, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, Poor Claudia, The Offing, jubilat, Memoir, Tupelo Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, DIAGRAM, The Volta Book of Poets, LitHub, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the low-residency Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University. She is also raising a teenager. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the low-residency Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University. She is also raising a teenager.
