Britteney black Rose Kapri - Black Queer Hoe

The Breakbeat Poets Series The BreakBeat Poets series, curated by Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall, is committed to work that brings the aesthetic of hip-hop practice to the page. These books are a cipher for the fresh, with an eye always to the next. We strive to center and showcase some of the most exciting voices in literature, art, and culture. BreakBeat Poets Series titles include: The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall This is Modern Art: A Play, Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval The Breakbeat Poets Vol II: Black Girl Magic, edited by Mahogany Browne, Jamila Woods, and Idrissa SimmondsHuman Highlight, Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval On My Way to Liberation, H. Melt Citizen Illegal, Jos Olivarez The Breakbeat Poets Vol III: Halal if You Hear Me, edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo There are Trans People Here, H. Melt Commando, Emon Lauren 2018 Britteney Black Rose Kapri Published in 2018 by Haymarket Books P.O.

Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org ISBN: 978-1-60846-953-6 Trade distribution: In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International, This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Printed in Canada by union labor. Cover design by Rachel Cohen. Cover photograph, Nadiyah (2017) by Maya Iman. www.mayaiman.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. take it all in. makemefamous, aint no victim here. no shame. just good lightingand a fuckable face. from the day my nudes leak It is my firm belief and chief recommendation that this book be read out loud in the back corner of the bus huddled up next to one or two of your best niggas; or in the living room, two on the couch and two on the floor, a blunt and a bag of something spicy being passed around; or in your room, alone, something mellow and hood turned all the way up, so loud its silence. from the day my nudes leak It is my firm belief and chief recommendation that this book be read out loud in the back corner of the bus huddled up next to one or two of your best niggas; or in the living room, two on the couch and two on the floor, a blunt and a bag of something spicy being passed around; or in your room, alone, something mellow and hood turned all the way up, so loud its silence.

Some of yall wont have access to some of those ways. This book isnt for yall and thats okay. Britteney Black Rose Kapri knows the gazes set upon her and in Black Queer Hoe she sets the conditions of our looking. From jump, the title tells us the body, in all its shapes and ways, would take center stage. Black Queer Hoe is at once a naming, a call for kin, a warning, a prayer too. Black Queer Hoe so boom. Black Queer Hoe so boom.

A kind of what had happened. The context. The landscape. Kapri maps a Black femme interior pastoral through poems alive somewhere between monologue and a confession. These highlight a link from the lyric of Lucille Clifton to the stand-up of Sommore as Kapris speaker slips from comic to storyteller to auntie to testifier. These poems locate themselves in rich Black femme oral traditions of dissing and telling the truth which span from porches to juke joints and main stages, reaching for Cliftons imaginative vulnerability and June Jordans ferocity in the key of MoNique.

These poems teach us about the belly laughs born out of wounds, interrogating and distrusting the same humor they embrace and defend with. The poem Bitch begins im the last one catcalled / outta me and my Bitches, gesturing toward a confession before swerving toward humor with probably cause i got bitch / pheromones. This poem, like many of Kapris poems, pivots so quickly through complex webs of tone, while patterns lure us into being disarmed. The poem bounces with repetition and litany, tools Kapri leans on often to build her poems that play well with her athletic ability to oscillate tone in a poem. The poem ends: men love to love me, i am that Bitch. men love me until im that crazy bitch. men dont want me calling myself a Bitch so they can. on the wrong tongue queen and Bitch sound the same. on the wrong tongue queen and Bitch sound the same.

Here, Kapri gestures back at the audience, sending any man excusing himself from this poem to examine his own mouth. Many of these poems talk back to several audiences: to men on Twitter, men on trains, people in the speakers bed, to white women, to family, to friends. The poet uses the address all through the collection both as an extension of love and an act of defense. Every-one gets called out or in, everyone gets shouted out or implicated. Whatever the energy, its Kapris time to sound off. This collection is capital-B Black Girl (un)interrupted, unfiltered, sometimes a sermon and sometimes a secret.

We move from the large-swath, big personality of Black femininity and queerness to more intimate and lyrical works like of wanting and hidradenitis suppurativa pt. 1, where the speakers skin condition and possible in-security is offered as a soft succulent. a little ugly cactus. These moments reveal a voice underneath the voice, one more intimate and insular, stripped of the bravado and those notes of stand-up. These moments offer us lines that are quieter and a speaker who is less concerned with addressing anyone besides themself or an intimate you. praise the lilac and periwinkle children they forced into me. i see it, the slow erasure of my fig, my mulberry. i hear them say plum plague, plummagic, plum list, plum mail and i know that is not an accident. i hear them say plum plague, plummagic, plum list, plum mail and i know that is not an accident.

Oh I want to eat this poem. How beautiful this pain is in Kapris hands. The surrealist nod of this poem echoes through the collection as forts made out of dicks and erotic poems for blenders; Kapri is just as sharp and tender when trying to make us laugh as when shes trying to let us in. The generosity of this collection comes in how it holds something and how bare Kapri allows us to see her. I hate when white people describe a Black poets work as raw, but I wanna say very Blackly that this collection is raw, raw how we said it in 2003 and how niggas from Milwaukee say it today, raaaawbloody even when graceful, a foul-mouthed book of psalms. Folks call work unflinching too.

I dont know if I vibe with that. I think I like work that flinches a little bit, work that addresses fear in a way that some label as fearlessness. To hell with fearlessness. These poems know fear and embrace it; their strength is drawn not from an attempt to vanquish fear but an attempt to understand the matrix of it, to learn to strive beside it. This brazen debut is good medicine and a needed shout in the world. Black Queer Hoe makes it clear Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a poet we must pay attention to, taking up the reins of many spoken word and literary ancestors and charging forward into poetics unafraid to be ratchet and bare.

Welcome to this motherfucking book! Journey into these poems knowing that Kapri might take care of you but she also might cuss you out. Enter knowing damn well you might get told about yourself as the Black Queer Hoe sings her song. Danez Smith

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