TheWhorebeast

About the collection

The Whorebeast is a poetry collection braided with essays and character studies, a biomythography in the tradition of Audre Lorde’s Zami, where memoir, fiction, and myth are not separate modes but one act of telling. It takes the Jezebel: the anti-Black caricature invented to dehumanize Black women and rationalize violence against them, and refuses to either accept it or simply reject it. Instead it builds her into a full myth, traced back through her biblical origins, from Eve to Jezebel to the Whore of Babylon, and argues that these are one figure: the woman whose hunger and power were too large for the structure that tried to contain her.

Hunger is the throughline: bloodlust, gluttony, erotic desire, the longing for the divine, and finally jouissance. The collection treats appetite not as sin but as the most sacred thing about us. Its argument runs underneath the theology of the patriarchal God and turns it inside out. If, as Feuerbach said, humanity invented God by projecting its highest qualities into the sky and calling them other, then The Whorebeast pulls that projection back down into the body where it began. The monstrous woman is humanity’s disowned hunger thrown into heaven and named evil. This book brings her home.

It is structured like a church service: Prelude, Selah, Sermon, Closing Prayer. Each poem works as a scene. The collection moves through bingeing, addiction, assault, death, and misogyny without flinching, and it does so across traditions, Christian devotion, Sufi ecstasy, rabbinic defiance, Vodun cosmology, feminist theory, because all of them are studying the same thing. It ends by turning to the reader. The projection turns around and looks back.

The Whorebeast is a philosophical, theological, anti-colonial, and feminist work that asks to be read seriously and rewards it.