A review by zellapaige
Black Queer Hoe, by Britteney Black Rose Kapri

inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

5.0

Journey into these poems knowing that Kapri might take care of you but she also might cuss you out. Enter knowing damn well you might get told about yourself as the Black Queer Hoe sings her song.
(Danez Smith, Foreward, xii)

i create space for marginalized / youth to counter the narrative being forced upon them. / i also punt toddlers for crying on airplanes.
(tindr, 1)

                                                this one time
a man follows me home from the train. forty feet from my
house i face him and start wiping my knife on my jeans. he
walks away. everytime i tell that story someone asks what
i would have done if he kept coming.
(shawty with the ass, 6)

Stand-out poems of the collection are; "reasons imma Hoe", "Bitch", "to the nigga who tweeted 'we need to stop glorifying fat people' while secretly receiving my nudes behind his girlfriend's back", the pair "hidradenitis suppurativa pt. 1" and "hidradenitis suppurativa pt. 2", the perhaps unintentional pair "an incomplete list: of what to do when you're fucked" and "titling", "micro" which helped me understand the functioning of capitalization throughout the collection, and "othered". 

The poems "reasons imma Hoe" and "Bitch" genuinely made me gasp out loud with their brilliance. Specifically, "reasons imma Hoe" struck me because it catalogs a non-comprehensive, but extensive, list of reasons why a woman may be critiqued or labeled Hoe.  The poem then takes that language that many women hear and turns it around. The speaker internalizes that misogynistic language through a series of "i" statements as if this language is coming from the woman herself rather than the critique of others. In near direct contrast, the poem "Bitch" turns the way that word is wielded as a weapon against women around and reclaims it.  The speaker is still internalizing the language of others, but in "Bitch" the word is becoming a source of strength and pride.

marvel at me. take it all in.
make      me       famous.
ain't no victim here. no shame.
just good lighting
and a fuckable face.

i'm a big glass of over your shit
and you looking thirsty            boy.
(the day my nudes leak, 22)

The sparse use of capitalization throughout the collection was one of the more innovative and fascinating aspects of the poems. I would estimate that about half of poems don't contain even a single capitalized word, titles included. It took me an embarrassingly long time, at least half the collection, to even begin to guess what specifically Kapri does choose to capitalize. The only capitalized words are words that directly link to Blackness, Queerness, and/or Hoeness.  Proper nouns are often lowercase through the collection, unless those proper nouns are referring to someone Black or a place like Chicago or South Side that is easily linked to Black communities. I realized this specifically in the poem "micro" in which the names of about twenty white women are left in lowercase and in the poem "othered" in which canada, associated with Kapri's father's white family is also uncapitalized. Obviously the words Black, Queer, and Hoe are capitalized through the collection, same with the word Bitch which Kapri often associates with her Hoeness. The only poem of the entire collection that deviates from this pattern is "Juvenile Detention Center Thursdays 5:30-7:00 p.m." this poem's form as a type of erasure is so unique from the rest of the collection makes it feel to me like the only poem of the collection that doesn't seem to belong.

i've cried in the pampers aisle of target. i used to fuck
unprotected, hoping it would end in a child that i had the
option to keep. i [want to] yell at tired moms. i am so
bitter to be an aunt. i take birth control to convince myself
it's a choice. my body feels like a sanctuary god or science
forgot to finish.
(my ob-gyn tells me i may not be able to have children, 29)

I adore this collection. Every poem in the collection made me feel something; seen, challenged, even ignored. I would give the collection 6-stars if I could.  The only thing I didn't enjoy about the collection were the pages of Kapri's tweets between the poems. While they brought the collection a bit of humor and maybe the tweet that inspired the title should have been included, I thought these poems were so strong that including the tweets didn't add to the collection in a meaningful way. 

i am all dagger mouth and bloody fist. / and i never ask questions later.
(pink crayon, 46)

Aside from a single poem this felt like the most cohesive collection I've ever read. Every poem was a pleasure and challenge to read.  Ultimately this collection is everything that I look for in poetry.  I love how Kapri's poetry embraces the hyper specificity of the human condition.  Traditional poetry tried to appeal broadly to the human condition and create universal statements, Kapri does not. She writes poems about her experiences and her life and welcomes the niche community that her niche voice will create. As a white woman I'm well aware that this collection was not written for me, but it made my Queerness and my Hoeness sing nonetheless.

i can't trust folks / who can only find empathy when facing a mirror.
(othered, 50)