Song of My Softening

The insightful debut by James explores the body and identity with bracing honesty and directness. Fatness and its accompanying social stigma are central themes but make up only one aspect of a more intricate, intersectional perspective. “When you are fat and queer and female and black/ When no one has any use for you except/ Your otherness// When your otherness is a currency,” James writes, laying bare the experience of tokenization and commodification of difference. Many poems ponder the objectification of Black female bodies within a matrix of beauty standards that shift across cultural contexts, from the U.S. to Trinidad to Nigeria, reflected in the speaker’s weary address: “Reader,/ I have been picked up, put down and considered, casually and constantly, which is the privilege/ of beauty.” James plots a difficult course toward bodily autonomy: “No matter how they/ try to claim you, your body/ will never belong to them. It will/ always be ours.” Often transgressive and always enlightening, this provocative collection confronts what it means to see and be seen, to consume and be consumed. (Feb.)