In or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life-from art and motherhood to trap music and love-as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

"The powerful fourth book from White challenges and embraces language on fresh terms as it explores motherhood, creativity, music, and Black feminism. . . . This collection is alive with urgent questions exquisitely posed." (Starred Review) (Publishers Weekly) "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) "These experiments in lyric poetry raise the bar for the syntactically possible - an amalgamation of bluntness, high theory, rage, subtlety, and feminist inquiry that performs space-clearing gestures in your mind long after you put the book down. I'm still striving to be 'unsentimental and intimate' with everyone; it is not easy." - Joseph Earl Thomas (The Week) "[T]his poet’s persistent-often astonishing-vision of 'a horizon of possible language' compels me to think more and to hit my limits more often. . . . The elegantly long lines, the periodic collapse of lineation into prose, the frequent dispersal of prose back into lines all place the genre in doubt and also insist on the work’s generic status as poetry, and on Simone White’s vocation as a poet." - Virginia Jackson (Public Books)

Simone White is Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, and House Envy of All the World.