Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems - Softcover

Powell, M. Mick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593733991 ISBN 13: 9780593733998

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2025

Synopsis

A dazzling docupoetic debut collection interweaving personal loss with the life stories of Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, and others to explore sexuality, survival, queer mourning, and the afterlives of stardom."I made, of my bones, an earth for you: turned the oceans

your favorite shade of light, that deepened, nearly bruised
dusk. Reflected in my palms, what I've made into water
glows amethyst: when you drink from it, you are iridescent,
luminous, lilting."

In m. mick powell’s polyphonic, haunting debut, a chorus of voices conjures up intimate pop herstories that have become a part of our collective cultural lore, resurrecting the vivid lives and artistries of iconic women like Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, TLC’s Left Eye, Phyllis Hyman, and Selena Quintanilla to map how the poet’s queer Black girlhood was molded by their memory.

With tender reverence, powell meditates on the deaths of her own beloveds while considering the multiple stages, both in private life and performance, that compose the fullness of a starlet’s legacy. How did these women challenge conventional representations of Black femininity and friendship, and forever transform the musical landscape? How did they navigate scrutiny and alienation in the limelight, often in the same industry as their abusers? How were their lives and deaths mythologized by those who survived them, and how do these archives establish afterlives of queer femme possibility?

Through sensual imagery, speculative verse, and splendid wordplay, Dead Girl Cameo takes us beyond the headlines, innovating a Black feminist poetic that traverses the richly-textured realms of grief, girlhood, love, widowing, femme friendship, and queer fandom.

About this title

About the Author

m. mick powell is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme, a poet, an artist, an Aries, and author of the chapbooks threesome in the last Toyota Celica and chronicle the body. Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize, and appear in RHINO, Muzzle, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. mick is a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut and an adjunct in Bay Path University's MFA in creative nonfiction writing program. A former Tin House Resident, she enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

dead girl interview

What gave you your girlhood? What took it away?
Where was your mother?
What do you see when I say “scarlet”?
Do you believe in the stars?
Are there other ways you wish you died?
Can you tell me again, about the dream?
And the morning after, when the moon set?
Tell me about your closest encounter.
When did you meet her?
She is the first person you thought of—how tenderly did you touch?
What world did you invent to survive?
What world did you invent to satiate?
Tell me about your own curious rage.
Finish the sentence: “in my archive of desire, I keep ________.”
What color is the thing that haunts you most?
Would you let me hold the memory?

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593733991
• ISBN 13: 9780593733998
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144