Black Queer Hoe

by Britteney Black Rose Kapri, Danez Smith (Foreword by)

Overview

Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

Women’s sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Button Poetry, Seven Scribes, and many other outlets, and anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She is a contributor to Black Nerd Problems, a Pink Door Retreat Fellow, and a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608469529
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Series:	BreakBeat Poets Series
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	635,920
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. She is also contributer for Black Nerd Problems and Pink Door Retreat Fellow. She is a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.

Editorial Reviews

10/01/2018
In a debut crackling with energy, honesty, and wit, Kapri moves to reclaim elements of language surrounding women’s sexuality, especially that of black women, that have long been defined by shifting modes of invisibility and hypervisibility. According to misogynistic, patriarchal double standards, she writes, to be a “hoe” is to defy an unattainable vision of womanhood. To open proceedings, Kapri announces that she “ain’t no shrew to be/ tamed, ain’t no horse to be broke, ain’t no Hoe to be/ housewived.” Next, in “reasons imma Hoe,” she exposes the way in which the shaming of a woman’s sexuality starts in adolescence: “a woman in church didn’t like that i walked like a grown woman. i was switching. i grew hips too young... i grew breasts too young. i distracted the boys from their schoolwork by showing my shoulders.” Kapri assails the ways social norms are routinely used to blame girls and women for the moral failures of boys and men. Embracing the intimacy of a confessional and the sting of a viral tweet, Kapri unabashedly celebrates the various facets of her self and refuses to serve as anyone’s martyr: “take it all in./ make me famous./ ain’t no victim here. no shame.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

This brazen debut is good medicine and a needed shout in the world. Black Queer Hoe makes it clear Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a poet we must pay attention to, taking up the reigns of many spoken word and literary ancestors and charging forward into poetics unafraid to be ratchet and bare.”
—Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead

“Britteney Kapri writes with the tenacity of your favorite emcee and the gumption of your most outspoken Auntie. In her first full-length collection, Black Queer Hoe, Kapri opens the entire conversation with the (un)justification of being labeled a Hoe and the womxn reader will find themselves gasping after each line, these poems serve as a re-introduction to our reflections. As profound as Eartha Kitt, as futuristic in her feminism as Grace Jones as positively unabashed about her body as Josephine Baker and as lyrically provocative as Cardi B; Kapri's multi-genre'd poetic offering is a new home for those unafraid of this brave cruel world.”
—Mahogany L. Browne, author of Black Girl Magic and co-editor of The BreakBeatPoets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic

“Britteney Kapri is a stunningly talented writer whose words reach out from the page and grab you around the throat one minute while pulling you into a hug in the next. This book is incredible.”
—Samantha Irby, author of Meaty

From the Publisher