“This brilliant, singular book makes me wonder about what knowledge is and how we get to it. It rejects conventional notions of gender even as it at times embraces them, creating a weirdly queer text inside of a text that’s focused on heterosexual sex, obsession, and love. Reading it forces us into activation and democratic participation, creating a dynamic energy between text and reader. Any reader of poetry, black critical thought, music theory, or experimental autobiography will find life in this work and will be compelled and captivated by it.” - Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood
“Simone White wields theory and science and rap culture with a kind of satisfaction and performative pleasure that both abandons and beckons the reader. Her book’s triumph is the manner in which she twists her theory and her blackness around the aggrievements and joys of motherhood and relationships while prescribing a quanta of potential music that will be commissioned by the fact of the book. Renewing scholarship by yoking it to the uncanny vortex of sex, White interrupts critical thought with a nice ripe swear. She is unceasingly dynamic.” - Eileen Myles, author of Evolution
"The powerful fourth book from White challenges and embraces language on fresh terms as it explores motherhood, creativity, music, and Black feminism. . . . This collection is alive with urgent questions exquisitely posed." (Starred Review) - Publishers Weekly
"White achieves a stunning and important feat in the articulation of the material dynamics of being and the pursuit of freedom. or, on being the other woman pulses with the vitality of a woman who has made her own language for love." - Tess Michaelson, Full Stop
"Those who have followed the unfolding of White’s poetic corpus have done so with pleasure and wonder. It is a body of work that has continually displaced itself, with a quality of restlessness that seemingly impels her to pursue a range of formal and compositional strategies, often within the same volume." - Andrew J. Smyth, The Poetry Project
"These experiments in lyric poetry raise the bar for the syntactically possible — an amalgamation of bluntness, high theory, rage, subtlety, and feminist inquiry that performs space-clearing gestures in your mind long after you put the book down. I'm still striving to be 'unsentimental and intimate' with everyone; it is not easy." - Joseph Earl Thomas, The Week
"[T]his poet’s persistent—often astonishing—vision of 'a horizon of possible language' compels me to think more and to hit my limits more often. . . . The elegantly long lines, the periodic collapse of lineation into prose, the frequent dispersal of prose back into lines all place the genre in doubt and also insist on the work’s generic status as poetry, and on Simone White’s vocation as a poet." - Virginia Jackson, Public Books
