I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On

I re-read Khadijah Queen’s collection, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, at least once a year. A series of kinetic prose poems that flow, without punctuation, from one encounter with a famous man to the next, and sound out the complex and muscular webs of power shaping each encounter along gender, race, class, age, and the double-edged gift of femme beauty. As the title promises, each poem presents one famous man that the speaker (or her ancestors) met (or nearly-met), and a description of what the speaker, in some poems aged 8 and in others aged 40, was wearing. Through these memories, which range from sweet to pathetic to disappointing to violent, Queen’s girlhood and young adulthood are rendered in such specific and hooking detail that she beats, alive, on each page as she learns how to move through a world where her beauty attracts attention, both wanted and unwanted. Where men tell her, again and again, what she already knows: the meaning of her own name. By the end, I move beyond my impulse to protect her. I want to listen to what she has to say.