Moving beyond a biting indictment of American popular culture, Jameka Williams captures the reader's gaze and stares right back: "I'm sorry, America, but I'm rich in baby oil & paperback novels only these days. So finish paying for me with what is mint. No conditions." In this stunning debut collection, Williams offers a deeply personal investigation into how Americans (herself included) have been duped, buying into classism, sexism, and racist beauty ideals, while sacrificing the freedom of self-love and self-determination. With whip-fast profanity and fiery humor, she charts a tender, exalting, and vibrant path to freedom from mirrors, stages, and screens. Fiercely feminist, Black, American, and powerful, Williams speaks for a generation of obsessive social media influencers and consumers, revealing the complex ways in which we are all actors, witnesses, and victims in our public and private performances. Though we may be permanent residents of this soulless cultural landscape, this stunning collection refuses to let it define us. I am not the same machine which came rambling off the conveyor belt, hugging the bolts & wires spilling from her vivisection. I'm last year's model with a sleeker, softer system of cool disdain for my Internet addictions. -Excerpt from "I Intend to Outlast
Jameka Williams holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her poetry has been published in Prelude Magazine, Gigantic Sequins, Muzzle Magazine, Yemassee Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review, and Oyez Review, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a Best New Poets 2020 finalist, published annually by the University of Virginia, and is featured in New American Press's New Poetry of the Midwest 2019. She resides in Chicago, Illinois.
American Sex Cento Scopophilia "People are dying, Kim" Intelligent Women Brief Notes on the End of the World, Women The All-American Girl "But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men" Plastic White Girl I Intend to Outlast Consider an Animal Ignition "There's a lot of baggage that comes with us, but it's like Louis Vuitton baggage (you always want it)" Black, or Apologies for the Line "Sally Hemings in Leggings" The All-American Girl New Black Venus My Sister Says ("Everyone can catch this smoke") Original Sin The Kardashians for a Better America American Sex Tape Black, or Even Now I Eat Like a Butcher's Dog Birth of the Nation Scopophobia I'm Not the Queen of the Selfie Woman Devours His Gaze This World Is Not Good Black, or I Sit on My Front Porch in the Projects, Waiting, on God Erotic Women Do It "Now that I've survived, when does living begin?" The Future Is Female Black, or There Is No Nation Both Under God & Above Ground Who Will Save Kim Kardashian? I Intend to Outlast War & Marriage The All-American Girl #Free Britney, Brittany, BritnEe & Brittani, Too Black, or The Natural World Doesn't Know Me Nothing Is Promised "I can't dwell?!?" The New Me The All-American Girl "The new american girl doll is no longer a slave" Since I Laid My Burden Down Acknowledgments Notes
"Every now and then, but rarely, a book of poems comes along that is biblical in its authority and iconoclastic in its capacity to rearrange or explode the furniture, the nation, and the self. American Sex Tape (TM) is one of those."-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets "Split between a love of watching and the fear created by it, Jameka Williams demolishes misogynist, racist logic with weaponized line breaks and wrecking-ball wit. And then does something stranger, braver: she looks into the camera. Because this is a book about taking back power, it's also about the thin line between pleasure and collusion. 'I love to see it,' she admits, 'I love to live inside that camera's orgasm.' Complex and messy and necessary in all the ways sex is, American Sex Tape (TM) is brilliant Black feminist truth."-Brian Teare "A triumph of a debut. Part cultural criticism, part self-investigation, Williams defies genre convention. Her poems burst onto the page with purpose, veracity, tenacity, and the self-assuredness of a long-established literary dynamo."-Laura Joyce-Hubbard, TriQuarterly
