Coming Soon

By Khadijah Queen

On Sale: Aug 5, 2025
Page Count: 352 pages
Publisher: Legacy Lit
ISBN-13: 9781538771174

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$19.99 CAD

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It's the late 1990s—Tupac is taking over radio waves, Inkster, Michigan is as Midwest as ever, and a young Khadijah Queen has just been recruited to join the U.S. Navy while working her day job at RadioShack. In light of her dwindling college tuition fund, her mother’s alcoholism and sisters’ addictions, and an impending future of minimum wage retail jobs, Bootcamp doesn’t sound so bad.

But soon after Khadijah completes her grueling training and boards her ship, finds herself in even more traumatic situations among strangers far from home. Surrounded by men in the sonar room, she struggles to maintain her dignity day after day while dealing with near-constant sexual harassment, weeks-long demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism from her coworkers. At first, she tries to bring honor to herself, her family, her division, and the navy, taking pride in her work while studying to become an officer and leaning on poetry to lift her spirits. Queen begins to wonder the issues she is faced with are worth what she was promised.

Queen must conceal a miscarriage, a subsequent pregnancy, and domestic violence while enlisted. She must decide where her loyalties lie: the life that was prescribed to her, or the new, unknown life that awaits her? Masterfully penned, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a searing chronicle about family, survival and autonomy, and one woman’s attempt to content with a workplace that is hostile to women.

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Khadijah Queen

About the Author

Khadijah Queen holds a PhD in English and literary arts from the University of Denver. She is the author of seven books of poetry and prose. Her work appears and has been praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. Queen is a Cave Canem alum, a 2022 United States Artists Disability Futures Fellow, a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow, and holds the 2025 Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She divides her time between the US, the UK, and France.

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