You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women’s Studies. Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Poetry. Angular, smart, and fearless, Arisa White’s newest collection takes its titles from words used internationally as hate speech against gays and lesbians, reworking, re-envisioning, and re- embodying language as a conduit for art, love, and understanding. To live freely, observantly as a politically astute, sensually perceptive Queer Black woman is to be risk taker, at risk, a perceived danger to others and even dangerous to/as oneself, writes poet Tracie Morris. White’s attentive word substitutions and range of organized forms, lithe anecdotes, and disturbed resonances put us in the middle of living a realized, intelligent life of the senses. YOU’RE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING THAT HAPPENED works through intersectional encounters with gender, identity, and human barbarism, landing deftly and defiantly in beauty.