Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer by Kateema Lee

Kateema Lee‘s Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer is full of surprises: sonic playfulness, encounters between pop culture icons and figures from childhood, insights spoken with a sharp tongue. These poems disarm you with familiar references and then take unexpected turns inward with the guidance of an introspective speaker. Lee tricks you into feeling wistful and then hits you with “something to cut the bullshit.” These poems are skillfully dark. From page one, this collection orients you within the disorienting experience of having too many choices, but Lee’s wild imagination knows exactly what to do with them.

–Jonterri Gadson, author of Pepper Girl and Blues Triumphant

In “Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer”, Kateema Lee streams poems, image by image, where pop-culture meets the reality of daily life. She explores “the imported sparkling water in a long-stemmed glass”. Lee is a poet juggling contemporary Netflix culture with humor and charm.

–Naoko Fujimoto, The winner of Oro Fino Chapbook Competition, “Home, No Home”

Even in moments as mundane as binge-watching prime-time dramas, we find ourselves interrogating the current states of our lives. In Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer, Kateema Lee’s poems speak through the ambient sounds of the late-night television screen, offering deceptively quiet musings on love, loneliness, and grief. And, in the breaks, creatures of nature and myth appear, serving as apt metaphors for a mind flipping through the myriad channels of its existence. Although Musings couches the bulk of its activities in the passive—watching television, observing women in public, or petting a dead father’s cats—it is a complex work that begs of us to look beyond the veneer of the ordinary and into the many frequencies of ourselves, the myriad ways in which we remain unknown and unseen to everyone around us.

–Destiny Birdsong, Poet, MFA, PhD