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  • The American Poetry Review

    REWIRING THE GENDERED GAZE

    May 01, 2019 6 minutes
    KRYSTAL LANGUELL

    AP2 Books

    Chelsey Minnis, Baby I Don’t Care
    Paperback, 272 pages
    Wave Books, 2018

    Khadijah Queen, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous
    Men & What I Had On
    Paperback, 96 pages
    YesYes Books, 2017

    Carmen Gimenez Smith, Cruel Futures
    Paperback, 88 pages
    City Lights Spotlight No. 17
    City Lights Books, 2018

    Recent poetry collections by Chelsey Minnis, Khadijah Queen, and Carmen Gimenez Smith rattle the bars of oppressive structures both seen and unseen. Each poet engages with male language, whether as her target or her medium, using it to build a feminist analysis of society’s patriarchal undergirding in stark clarity. Minnis’s latest, , performs this critique in the most literal fashion, collaging dialogue from Turner Classic Movies into mock centos in two stanzas of five lines each. Queen’s likewise assembles source material, here in list form. Prose blocks catalogue celebrity run-ins, tracing the selfie impulse back to the not-so-distant past of pagers and pay phones. Often these famous men tattle on themselves, but Queen’s speaker also, returns the voyeuristic male gaze that looms and leers from television screens—the threat all the more palpable via what she and Dana Levin call in a recent interview at LitHub “our first selfie president.”

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