Khadijah Queen homes in on her selections by following three keywords through the archive: disobedience, Detroit, and joy. She introduces Rachel Zucker’s lecture on the confessional mode in poetry (“What We Talk About When We Talk About the Confessional and What We Should Be Talking About”), francine j. harris’s lyric dense with complicated emotions (“katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet.”), and Monica Sok’s poem of gentle power in the face of trauma (“The Woman Who Was Small, Not Because the World Expanded”). Queen closes by reading “Declination,” which approaches her chosen keywords through the lens of making art.

 Watch the full recordings of Zucker, harris, and Sok reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Rachel Zucker, lecture (2016)
francine j. harris (2015)
Monica Sok (2020)

You can also find a reading by Khadijah Queen on Voca, which was given in 2016.