Description
Book SynopsisIn this stunning debut collection, Jameka 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.
Trade Review“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™ 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™ 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,
TriQuarterlyTable of Contents
- 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, BritnÉe & 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
