OMOTARA JAMES
SONG OF MY SOFTENING
A profound and intersectional text, Song of My Softening is a queer, fat, love song of the interior. A late-bloomer’s coming of age lyric.
This award-winning collection is a study in tenderness, vulnerability and candor. James provides a window into what perseverance looks like, ungilded: a mirror for anyone born into a culture outside of their identity. These poems hum with multitudinous survival.
Each poem is a celebration of sound. Born from revolutionary praise songs of Yoruba culture, Trinidadian Soca and Calypso, British Pop and Punk, American Gospel and R&B, Song of My Softening will sing itself into your soul.
PRESS DETAILS
Release date: February 13, 2024
Publisher: Alice James Books
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 978-1948579247
Publicist: Genevieve Hartman, at publicity@alicejamesbooks.org, or Emily Marquis, Press Associate at alicejamesea@alicejamesbooks.org.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“A sumptuous, unforgettable debut, Song of My Softening relentlessly unearths and acknowledges the pains of the past, though its work is ecstatic in equal measure. James wields language masterfully, not as a weapon but as an instrument that can transform pain into a song of praise, for pleasure and survival, for the body and its bounties. It is a song that rings and rings, that will ring in me for a very long time.”
— Melissa Febos
ADVANCE PRAISE
"Omotara James has used the page, the word and this wonderful book, Song of My Softening, to etch a particular achy wandering silence that is as loud and brilliant as any book I've read. One can only argue whether an abundance of skill or will was most necessary to pull off this literary feat. One cannot, and should not, ever argue about the book's multilayered longing boom."
— Kiese Laymon
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Omotara James is a poet of the body, and Song of My Softening moves us emotionally as it reminds us of our physical and sensual selves. These poems beg to be spoken aloud as one sister might to another, or as one sister might to an audience of sisters. These are daring poems from a poet brave enough to take the kind of risks that lead to beauty: ‘Your fat spills soft across the moonlit crown of grass./Your soulmates are a gaggle of fish, shoaling thick,/until you are schooled enough in this love.”
— Jericho Brown
ADVANCE PRAISE
"One of the defining poets of her generation…Omotara deepens the unsaid with such brilliant sonic resonances, hinting at truths too complex to tell any other way, which is what poetry can do. And does in each poem in this astonishing book."
— Idra Novey
REVIEWS
“Tender, beautiful, stark, painful—”
— Leila Fadel, NPR’s Morning Edition
REVIEWS
“It’s not often that fat women feel such thorough representation of themselves not only in poetry but in any media and not only in the beautiful moments but in the sorrowful ones, ranging throughout life. James does a brilliant job of portraying this and all her themes brilliantly; highly recommended.”
– Starred Review by Sarah Michaelis, Library Journal
REVIEWS
“The insightful debut by James explores the body and identity with bracing honesty and directness…Often transgressive and always enlightening, this provocative collection confronts what it means to see and be seen, to consume and be consumed.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
REVIEWS
I had to wait more than a year to read her first full-length collection, “Song of My Softening”; it was entirely worth it.
Her poems explore the experiences of a Black queer woman whose life and body are routinely dismissed and disparaged. But she persists until she can sing in full-throated celebration, “Today we are alive / in summer. Unencumbered.” This is an intimate, vulnerable and ultimately triumphant collection.
— Ron Charles, Washington Post
REVIEWS
“I love these poems. Song of My Softening is spectacular. It is really, really lovely.”
— Elizabeth Scanlon, The American Poetry Review
REVIEWS
"[Song of My Softening] is a siren song, a brilliant, harsh indictment of the way we communicate ideas about the body, sex, and womanhood to our young girls, and how we grow up into the women we are, as queer women of color. And even more than that, it is a poet’s handbook, viciously interrogating what makes a poem, and how to expand and contract the poem’s form into something useful and even something revolutionary. Finally, Song Of My Softening is a sharp, beautifully-wrought collection of poems, as well as a tool for grieving, a personal diary of loss."
— Joanna Acevedo, The Adroit Journal
REVIEWS
“Song of My Softening builds upon the legacy of Whitman’s Song of Myself and its celebration of the body, flawed and messy and beautiful. Omotara James is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting debut voices of the year.”
— Ronnie K. Stephens, TPQ
REVIEWS
"Song of My Softening by Omotara James is a fierce tour-de-force by a debut voice who I’m certain will be around to continue to thrill readers with her language, vulnerability and bravado."
— Joseph O. Legaspi, Water~Stone Review
ABOUT
Born in Britain, Omotara James is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. She is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning poetry collection, Song of My Softening, (Alice James Books, 2024). NAACP Image Award finalist, James’ poems have been featured in NPR’s Morning Edition, the Washington Post, the Best American Poetry anthology, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series and Poetry Daily. You can find her poems in print and online at Poetry Magazine, The Nation, BOMB Magazine, the Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, the Believer, Literary Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Daughter Tongue, was selected by African Poetry Book Fund, (Akashic Books, 2018), for the New Generation African Poets Box Set.
She has performed on various stages including the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, 92NY, the Brooklyn Book Festival, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the New York City Poetry Festival and the Poetry Project. Her work has been anthologised and selected for inclusion in various publications.
Her poems were shortlisted for the 2025 NAACP Image Award, the 2025 Norma Farber First Book Award, the 2025 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry, the 2025 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Award and the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She has been invited to residency fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, the Cave Canem Foundation and Lambda Literary, among other awards and recognitions.
James is a Guest Editor of The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She is the recipient of the 2023 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation; a 92NY Discovery Poetry Award; a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Poetry; the inaugural Thomas Lux Scholarship from The Palm Beach Poetry Festival; and a Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Prize, from Hofstra University.