or, on being the other woman

"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

“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