Book Review: I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On: A Narrative by Khadijah Queen

Reviewed by Danny Caine

I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On
A Cross-genre Narrative by Khadijah Queen
YesYes Books, March 2017
$18.00; 96 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1936919468

Khadija Queen’s I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On bills itself as “A Narrative.” The collection, which the YesYes Books website calls “cross-genre,” though all the pieces are identical in form, is a series of prose poems and/or short essays and/or flash fictions in which a speaker recounts the story of meeting a celebrity and her outfit at the time. Such a concept can seem gossipy at first glance, as confirmed by Adrian Matejka’s back-cover blurb which promises “a pop-culture archive […] of almost-forgotten R&B singers and A-list movie stars, rappers, and comedians.” But there’s more to see here than famous men behaving badly.

Still, there’s reward in reading Queen’s cutting, funny, and sometimes devastating accounts of thirsty celebrities. In back-to-back pieces, an anonymous Jodeci member and Dave Chapelle ogle the speaker’s ass, with Chapelle adding a drawn-out “Daaaaaaaaaaamn.” In the next poem, as the speaker wears “the same jeans,” Chris Rock “looked twice.” Forgotten Snoop Dogg acolyte ½ Dead tries to remove the speaker’s sister’s dress during a video shoot. Sometimes these encounters are funny; sometimes they’re harrowing, like when an unnamed “Famous Poet” forces himself onto the speaker in “a hotel closet at a writing conference.” Such licentious famous men are present in I’m So Fine, yet they’re not what animates the book.

Queen is up to more, as she herself admits in the conclusion to the piece about the Famous Poet: “why couldn’t all this only be about name-dropping & brand names & puddintang ask me again I’ll tell you the same.” Part of the success of I’m So Fine stems from its promise of “A Narrative.” While the book’s main conceit is the list of celebrities and outfits, its sneakier and more powerful through-line is the evolution of Queen’s speaker. We see the speaker first as a fangirl teenager, too shy to dance onstage at a Prince concert, whose mother has to get Bizzy Bone’s autograph for her. Then, throughout the book, we see the speaker as a solider in the Navy, working part-time as a video extra, as a mother, even attending a gala featuring Bill Clinton as she wears “a strapless dress white taffeta bodice with an asymmetrical peplum hem & black chiffon skirt I had to Cinderella-lift when I walked so it wouldn’t drag the floor.” The famous men are constant, and their gaze is often predatory, but the character of the speaker evolves enough to earn the book’s classification.

Ultimately, the “Narrative” of I’m So Fine bends towards empowerment. Early pieces see the speaker giggling in the wake of members of Jodeci, but the collection’s final piece, “Any Other Name: A Postscript” declares “I cut off my hair because I wanted to begin again with something on my body no man has touched,” and later, “All praises due to the part of me that listens to herself first.” In another late piece, Queen’s narrator declares “40 is cool 40 is seeing & knowing not seeing & wanting […] 40 seeks all the June sun instead of shade.” By I’m So Fine’s end, Queen’s speaker has forsaken shade for another kind of power, realizing “I am tough enough to know what I can take & satisfied with keeping stars on the screen & out of my eyes my well-used heart.” By relegating stars to screens instead of fantasies, Queen’s narrator chooses her own strength over the pursuit of male celebrities. In doing so, Queen’s speaker paints a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.

Danny Caine is author of the chapbook Uncle Harold’s Maxwell House Haggadah (Etchings Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, and New Ohio Review. He hails from Cleveland, Ohio, and lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he works at The Raven Book Store.