Anodyne

by Khadijah Queen

The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

Genres: Poetry, African American

100 pages, Paperback

First published August 18, 2020

About the author

Khadijah Queen is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, including Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2025 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts recognized Queen’s work with the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea, a memoir about her time in the U.S. Navy alongside short histories of maritime women, is forthcoming from Legacy Lit/Hachette in August 2025.

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I was not the right reader for these poems right now. They are dense; staccato in language and sad and they probably reward close reading and they just didn't connect with me right now. I could get glimpses of the emotion and stories behind the language but I'm not in a place where this particular type of language virtuosity worked for me.

**Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Abby Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always loved this collection of poetry but only recently made my way through cover to cover. It’s not the kind of poetry book that requires one to do so, but I was always so fascinated by it anyways, that I just wanted to feel it in its collective wholeness. Queen strings together words and thoughts in ways that never fail to leave me a bit out of breath, or just very deep in consideration of any given emotion. Usually both. She also pushes my understanding and knowledge of poetry in ways that only a contemporary artist can manage. Would recommend!

[Sofia Cabrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Khadijah Queen's text. This is a study of form, and there were some poems that were unusual to read. However, her technique is quite unique. As I read, I made connections to her poetry and observed her style of writing. Her poems seemed to be prose or even free verse. But she also puts her own taste on her writing. Initially, I thought the title of each poem was different. In a way, some seemed to be connected and more personal to the author. My favorite piece was "Double Windlass". I do not want to spoil it, but I recommend the read. You'll understand my review and what I mean by Queen's "unique writing techniques." Overall, great read!

[Hannah-Renea Niederberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first of Khadijah Queen's collections I'd read, who I've wanted to read for a while. It definitely did not disappoint! Highly poignant with imagery that just draws you in, this collection was wonderful. I look forward to reading more of Queen's works in the future.

[Zish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complex and raw. It went over my head so I had to re-read most of it. I enjoyed I thoroughly.

[Stefani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never know how to talk about poetry, just that it feeds something deep within me, that it feels vital and nourishing. I loved the poems in Khadijah Queen’s Anodyne (forthcoming Aug 18th) for their quiet insistence. I appreciated the varied structures that the poems came in and all the topics covered: family, work, Black expectation, age, love, etc. Poetry is the best kind of window and Queen’s collection shines as one. Plus, I knew it would be a good book when I saw it was framed by a Kendrick Lamar quote. Also, check out that gorgeous cover.

(I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous collection, these poems truly are an anodyne (had to look up the word; now, I love it!) for our troubled and troubling times. Meticulously wrought, the poems move between the deeply personal and searing political and social commentary. My world and my understanding of the world are richer for having read them. It's that rare kind of book that you read and then have to start over and read again. Bravo, Khadijah Queen! I said it aloud when I closed the covers and I say it again here. Thank you for bringing this work into the world.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection of art. Khadijah Queen’s words touched my soul. I found myself wanting to sit with some poems and may have only read 1-2 per day; other times I found myself reading pages and pages as it was recharging a part of me that yearns for perspective.

One I’ll reread many times over the years.

Some may have been over my head but regardless made me inquisitive. I look forward to reading this again in the future and seeing how different poems connect differently.

[Jana]

Subtext poetry box from Elliott Bay Books.

Is it my shortcoming in reading poetry? I don’t understand most of these. Not for lack of trying, at least in the beginning. Reading them a few times through.

Off to see what I can learn from outside sources wiser than I am before I come back to this again.

[Srinaath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Queen’s poems allow us a gaze into her mesmerizing, broken reality. Sometimes it’s too broken; the pieces never quite connect. But when stories within the gaps come together, a new dimension of language—of dialogue—opens and leaves us in awe

[Brigitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this book and I loved teaching it. The first and last poem are the ones that gut me every time, but it’s the first poem that shifts how to read the collection each time.

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites were named Route and I Have A Method of Letting Go. Read in an uncertain time.

[Angela]

I love this collection so much, so finishing the last poem was a heartbreak beyond words. I am so, so glad I picked this up. Now, I want to give it to everyone I know.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

**************
In the event of an apocalypse, be ready to die
But do also remember galleries,
gardens, herbaria.
Repositories of beauty now
ruin to find exquisite—
I doubt we’re much to look at,
as we swallow what has to hurt until we can sing
sharp as blades.
avoiding
evidence of suffering at all costs, & reach
clone-like into the ground as aspen roots.
A tiny now to ffed on
So clear the heart after
the unreal takes up—
Turn the wake
sublime—
Identify a new habit
in progress
a good succulent
in a sea of smooth pebbles.
We came to paint neon text
On a black wall with a ten-foot paintbrush, rhapsodic
We came to find out when molecules touch & almost react
I slept so sure in a used place & so anonymous
like womanhood & so hypervisible
I slept in a kind of fire & became it.
*********** m y f ou nd po em.

There is so much in these poems it will take a while to think about, and I cherished the Colorado references, as the poet teaches in Denver, perhaps hidden in jokes that make you feel part of the poem, part of the world the poet is building and sharing so we can learn how to be better humans. I loved everything about these poems, the innovation, the surprise, the depths, the absolute calling to be both something that relieves distress and is unobtrusively inoffensive (definition of anodyne) since it can kill you to be offensive in our racist societies. Just perfect. Modern, alive, perfect.

Wasn’t it you who told me civilization is impossible in the absence of a spirit of play. —Anne Carson

IN THE EVENT OF AN APOCALYPSE, BE READY TO DIE

But do also remember galleries,
gardens, herbaria.
Repositories of beauty now
ruin to find exquisite—

untidy, untended loveliness of the forsaken,
of dirt-studded &
mold-streaked treasures
that no longer belong to anyone alive,

overrunning & overflowingly unkempt
monuments to the disappeared.
Chronicle the heroes & mothers,
artisans who went to the end of the line,
protectors & cowards.

Remember when pain was not to be
seen or looked at,
but institutionalized. Invisible,
unspoken, transformed
but not really transformed.

Covered up with made-up
valor or resilience. Some people
are not worth saving, no one wants to say,
but they say it in judgment.

They say it in staying safe in a lane
created by someone afraid of losing ground,

thinking—I doubt we’re much to look at,
as we swallow what has to hurt until we can sing
sharp as blades. Aiming for the sensational

as we settle for the ordinary, avoiding
evidence of suffering at all costs, & reach
clone-like into the ground as aspen roots, or slide

feet first down a soft slope, wet, cold—but the faith
to fall toward the unseen, the bleak of most
memory—call it elusive. Call it the fantasy to end

all fantasies, a waiting fatality, blight of both
education & habit. Warned inert,
we could watch ourselves, foolish, lose it all.

EROSION

10 million years casts any movement as given. Grand Mesa—prone
to rockslide but craters at Dotsero stay young. Once,
lava flow took a mile of highway, stretched out its red heat & black
smoke rising grey to white, no lake, crawling baby of magma
& water. When snow-topped, both still boom with basalt.
That molten underground we swim the surface of.
In Palisade the low range casts no shadow over the vines,
peaks rising inward as separate entities, stark high earth
and low-height green. Road dust cradles the ground.

A drink in the evening becomes two, laughter then
a free confession overlooking lavender fields—man-made,
another desert verdanted, in which one person admits
they are precious enough to hide—the night brings out hunters—
intoning survival in that shadow, blink of life in swallow & vapor,
body ever in revolt, a red centimeter of a mouth asking
what else. How we fail is how we continue.

LIVE UNADORNED
Turn the wake
sublime—

Identify a new habit
in progress
a good succulent
in a sea of smooth pebbles

A sky can be grey even in a warm off-season
In defiance of time the smallest people dance in it naturally
They want to have the last sound

MONOLOGUE FOR PERSONAE

We came to silken the asterism
We came drunk off sea liquor to unravel threads of flesh
We came to be shaped, enough repetition
We came to be in flux, unnamed, then pronounced by care
We came to have our newness used up by the wrong power,
We came to be tucked back into embrace

A TINY NOW TO FEED ON
So clear the heart after
the unreal takes up—

I’ve not learned
what to sew besides
more, other scars—

how to live exuberant with settle
too much room
underneath skin feels like crossing
to stay golden
Seconds wasted
count as wanting…

HORIZON ERASURE
…Blue-grey braceleted
Hollow torrent threat
comes on cloud shift…

X.

In Blombos Cave an etching—  
a cave of swimmers. a lake of sand dunes.
in every rock a green across the first continent.
100 years / 100,000—collapsed

gesture learned, the mark of wanting
to make marks in the surrounding
objects to say: what?

what once marked the body?
—too much pressed into bones—
ancient value feels hopeful,
the Blackest millennia so vindicated.
an ochre block & a herd of cattle
sweep across hyperbolic pastoral,
a history in skin in blood in
everything alive a disturbance

THE RULE OF OPULENCE
It’s Mother’s Day and I’d always disbelieved permanence—
newness a habit, change an addiction—
but the difficulty of staying
put lies not in the discipline of upkeep,
as when my uncle chainsaws hurricane-felled birches
blocking the down-sloped driveway,
not in the inconvenience of well water
slowing showers and night flushes,
not in yellowjackets colonizing the basement,
nuzzling into a hole so small only a faint
buzz announces their invasion when
violin solos on vinyl end, but in the opulence
of acres surrounding a tough house,
twice repaired from fires,
a kitchen drawer that hasn’t opened properly
in thirty years marked Danger, nothing more
permanent than the cracked flagstone
path to the door, that uneven earth, shifting.

ANTEDILUVIAN

Were you at
sea in memory, gathered into lyric, your body
pretending any era was a safe one
…
mayfly wings flash
their iridescence in the dark Nothing
works

SESTINA FOR PERSONAE

We choose to call our scatter
Expansion—openness, inexact song,
Imaginative loop
We came to what wants to surface—

The rest revealed in undercurrents, our bodies
Insistent

We came to choose (indiscernible mumbling or
opera singing & unrestrained laughter)
chocolate cosmos, floriphages, all summer surfaces
Maintained in drought, anything we can count on—
(folds into self) insistent

Who are we? Orion songs, missed evergreens, bodies
Looped into every surface, looped Insistent into struggle—
like heirloom seeds, rising in scatter

RETREAT

Can I collect my fragments,
fragile now in the gentleness
your questions taught?  

No such marginalia. In every burst
of agreement, no turbulence to try
& estrange us, no opposition to  

map onto the joke. Observe
the rough architecture a whole person
bases key decisions on,  

its faulty edges hazed against clarity,
uncut nails catching on unfortunate silk—

DECLINATION

The mountains shadow the rust of the cold day breaking
and we hum with energy. Winter keeps us lucky, rested, like suns.

Aloud your voice heightens its wrongness
You speak anyway because you are learning /
I think this might be the end of insecurity

We have flooded ourselves, we have flooded
Nine hazel trees & a mother’s body as a door of no return
A mother’s body as a place we’ve been mapped inside of, a
galaxy pointing toward grit, & who can feel the possible
in their bodies & not break toward it—

THE WORLD SAYS NOT TO EXPECT THE WORLD

But do it anyway— be made, all out of love—
taken, bestowed, lived through, by means of, without  
the beauty we don’t want to waste & the world says
it wants, but trashes, sees as glut, usable in a finite manner
We like talk of human forevers as holes in us
unfilled, we’re raggedy apartments

ANODYNE

I wish I’d learned to take better care
As if this world tried to love me
A body I used up on hard ground,
flowsy & sop-studded, misplacing words
I keep to settle for pain
Pitch breaks in— body leaning into quiet
I couldn’t ask for, what I needed & thought
I couldn’t afford. A shun, undone,
a hush a shudder through

IMMINENCE

A pair, young, embrace—heels lift, arms encircle,
not expecting lifetimes to come next, bodies grown taller in a blink,

If even our buried objects strike us as reversal of sky,
& we look down only in the wrong seasons at what sustains our weight

& containment means existing inside, & when we contain
we are contained in time, in place, in memory,
those immensities we forbid ourselves, so vast
our resistance as infinite tininess, defiance an Atlantic problem,
hallucination, worse, cello-soundtracked—
choices to make for the labyrinth

ROUTE

Unlit, we left at break, rode south
Turned hard left up canyon,
up rockslide-paved wind-sown center of buttes
Lungs opened to river down into cut cliffs
White-topped energy shift over plain hills
Played over steep rock vein
…
Cut body coming to memory as arid
An astonishing Sea of sagebrush,
sand, low forest of scrub pine
Tough piñon

EPILOGUE FOR PERSONAE

We came to the past, at night, in some future access point,
Moonless. We hold no blame
For attachment past attachment’s end,
We show up to show how we arrive—
A path to lose our sense of others
We came to paint neon text
On a black wall with a ten-foot paintbrush, rhapsodic
We came to find out when molecules touch & almost react
We came to approach green with shaped blue or flood
The field pink, its shapes folding, the page weight
Undoing weightlessness, opposites
Allowed to oppose in peace,
Reflective counterpoint Imagining

I SLEPT WHEN I COULDN’T MOVE

I slept in a mountain cottage & wrapped myself in a crocheted blanket & sorrow & wrote poems about my animus

I slept in the palm of my own Black hand I slept when I couldn’t move
I slept in a place that hadn’t been built yet & dreamt the sheer violence of the future I slept inside a song with a Blacker voice than mine which meant I slept good

I slept when I couldn’t move I slept in a California desert, free of bodies & trees
I slept in senescent lake muck I slept through earthquakes & El Niño & never stopped traveling

I slept to the repetition of Cesária Évora
I slept on a feather bed & let myself dream a cracked blue
I slept in a red dress & sparrows woke me in the morning
I slept in a black dress & saw a hawk in my grandmother’s magnolia
I slept in my beauty & in sleep I knew that beauty as inheritance couldn’t be stolen or strung up or caged or appropriated effectively & it’s mine & what I have to own I have to love it

I slept in the infinite arrangements of Prince’s instruments

I slept crying every night for a year when I failed at my best thing but I kept him alive I slept in a world I forgot to love sometimes I slept as if I still believed in rescue
I slept expensively & poorly & middle class
I slept when I couldn’t afford to I slept in stolen freesia
I slept for a moment in snow & reclamation

I slept so sure in a used place & so anonymous
like womanhood & so hypervisible
I slept in a kind of fire & became it
I slept in a place of brilliant bones & the future of Blackness
I slept in a system outside of every law but one
I slept when I couldn’t move I slept in a simple way
I slept in a place just for us I slept where I could see it

[Stormy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard this author interviewed on CO Public Radio and thought I'd get the book for reading aloud to my 96 year old mother. I read a couple complete poems and small excerpts of a few to her. I personally read all the poems but didn't connect. Her vocabulary is much richer than mine. I couldn't get with the flow and couldn't do them justice reading aloud.

I gleaned a few things from some of the poems regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement.
For example:
Antedluvian - ... last line: But we only ask that you don't kill us
Afterlight Erasure middle line: Sometimes force means react right


I apppreciated The Rule of Opulence and the poems that were lines single spaced. They flowed for me.

I had no idea what to do with the 6 block poems with a few words in each block. I even looked up info about what they were modelled after and didn't get further undertanding.

The author is a creative writing teacher and connected to two Universities I know. If the opportunity arises I might learn more.

In the meantime, I will pass this book on to one of several friends who appreciate poetry more than I do.

[Camille Dungy]

The poems in Anodyne are carved out of the landscapes of this world, like rock art that seems to scream SOMEONE WAS HERE!! These poems refuse to be “invisible, unspoken.” Refuse to be “covered up / by made-up valor or resilience.” They insist on taking up space in the landscape, as painful as that might be. They remind us that our culture’s judgments suggest that “some / people are not worth saving,” and they resist such judgments and the actions such judgments unleash. The poems remind me that “Hordes of animals without teeth crash the window in a / dream & it means you’re not hungry enough.” These poems make me hungry, if hunger means I must look more closely at many types of pain and the roots of that pain too. If hunger means I will pay attention to the bodies that live alongside me, where they hurt and what it means to acknowledge the hurt bodies that are fully and fiercely HERE.

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/10/fif...

[Abigail Zimmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of endurance - of living through pain, of living through the pain of those you love. Of holding moments of pain and joy at the same time ("What else can we do for protection? I think about that in the ecstasy of a sweet peach & irony of death & theft of indigenous land & the of language in every space I enter").

Some dense and challenging poems and some exquisite ones. I like when she gets list-y as in "I Slept When I Couldn't Move" and "NJ Transit Passenger Mode." And her poems that are intentionally on the look out for joy as in "Common Miracles" and "Ancient Mother I Keep Teaching Us New Ways to Find Joy."

Some particularly favorite lines:

"I know how to make a frail body
look perfect but not a sad mind or a world
that can't catch up"

"(I love how you love promises because they are lies)
(I love the honesty of cheap rings)"

"& we can get joy
clocking subterranean
pursuits of cave-evolved fish on Nat Geo"

[Nicole Sandoval · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anodyne is a true feat. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, it is full of rich, yet dense, poetry that may need a few read-overs to "get" some of these poems. Indeed, even after rereading, it may be difficult to understand. However, to me, the beauty of poetry is its subjectivity and layers - so the density does not bother me as much as other reviewers. Also, Queen wears her heart on her sleeve in this collection. Anodyne has a wide range of subject matter: from her mother's dementia to her own chronic pain. Queen plays with form in Double Windlass, while keeping it fresh in every other poem. Though I enjoy many of the poems here, I gravitate to the intro piece, "In The Event of An Apocalypse, Be Ready to Die." Overall, I would recommend this collection but would not recommend it to a person who is just beginning to read poetry!

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do we talk about something like pain, in all its forms physical and emotional? The dual meaning of the word Anodyne, as a salve, but also as something inoffensive is a brilliant use of a beautiful word. Is pain somehow inoffensive? Or is what heals it inoffensive? There's a lot going on here, a personal and confessional collection that is also thoughtfully and interesting experimental addressing what it is like to live in an authoritarian or fascist area, the racial tensions and injustices of our time, and dealing with the pain of others (be it a son struggling with mental health issues or a mother experiencing dementia).

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is there a salve in the frisson of language? An anodyne to offer relief. Can the dexterous stretching, unfolding, transmogrifying text retain personal and structural destructions? (Interior/exterior/blurred). The split nature of Anodyne is propelled by Queen's fractious and sharp lexicon and the potentiality lingering in each enjambment.

Possibilities scatter, loop, multiply, and deny themselves. Lyrics are split, language is left with holes, vacancies, negative space. And then we are braced with a direct address: family or heartache or self split again in lyric.

Queen's poems are stunning codecs, vibrant and moving like a torrent through you.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about family, motherhood, identity, and the body.

from Of All the Things I Love: "My son wants to leave, depression making / talk of permanent exit a habit. I make him / laugh, a temporary stay, spend every penny // I have to keep him in comfort and joy"

from Dementia is One Way to Say Fatal Brain Failure: "Whose mind loses when / the loved decline. / Human by whose degrees."

from Double Life: "...we ran / off each random white man who thought / he could eat in our silence // with our crass laughter & endless / sentences about oppression in work / like & bloodstreams, ours & others' / & who did they think they could escape now"

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Tin House and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available Aug 18 2020

From the talented Khadijah Queen comes another sharply observed, generous and deeply heartfelt inventory of the soul. Ranging from love poems to mental health to politics of NJ Transit, Queen has a way of transforming the ordinary into light and dark, creating quiet spaces of reflection in an often too loud world. I can't do her work any justice other than to say that it acts as an anodyne, or painkiller, for the soul.

[madison]

Most of these poems aren’t my cup of tea, and that’s ok. I had a hard time connecting, the flow didn’t work for me. The poems I did like I REALLY liked — Synesthesia, Reclusionary, NJ Transit Passenger Ode, Double Life, I Slept When I Couldn’t Move. I Slept When I Couldn’t Move made the entire book worth reading. The second half was much stronger for me than the first. I plan to read more of Queen’s work after this.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Tin House for a copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a contemplative collection of poems that had content I liked, but several poems that had structures I wasn’t a big fan of. Every poem had a story, though, and nearly all of them had shimmering moments where the wording was just beautiful; it was definitely the case that some had more of these than others.

Even if I wasn’t as big of a fan of the structure of a lot of these poems, I do respect how Queen played with it, never sticking to one particular format. I guess this was where the collection occasionally felt disjointed, but I found there was much to contemplate that, ultimately, made me like this collection.

[Honey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a method of letting go: the most insane poem I have ever read.

antediluvian

sestina for personae: yessss give me form and experimentation

sky erasure

in the quiet: "for fun and distraction- American horror story / violence I can turn off

the world says not to expect the world

NJ transit passenger ode: more like this please 👍concrete images are good

double life

I slept when I couldn't move: great closer

[Joanna’s Reading Rainbow · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not my preferred style of poetry and I didn’t know that going in. Many poems I could not fully understand, they felt random and a little all over the place, but that could have been because I am not familiar with this type of writing. The poems that I did understand didn’t really do anything for me.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful book of poems captured that ideal balance of making the personal feel universal. Some of the poems felt fragmented, but the language was so beautiful all the way through. Many of her poems felt especially relevant and important during this time of crisis in the US.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

These are very good poems, I think, likely for someone else, but not quite up my alley.

We came to be shaped, enough repetition
We came to be in flux, unnamed, then pronounced by care

from "Monologue for Personae"

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of it sounds like a foreign language, the way words are just put out there, but there's an obvious sincerity and highlight in the way the writer speaks of her family, her son, brother, grandmother. flowers and bird imagery. easy to read in one sitting.

[Teena Chumber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I like it but not so sure. I don’t know how to read poems written in a table. Read any line next to any other and u have a different poem. Interesting but not sure. Liked the poems: Declination and I slept when I couldn’t move. Some poems were all over the page, very distracting.