A Finalist for the 2025 Norma Farber First Book Award
A Finalist for the 2025 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Recommended by Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Shondaland, & Book Riot
“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 Library Journal
"James’s poems explore the dynamic we have with the self and expand it to the dynamic between the world and Black queerness. The words here cut to the quick in terms of how they call out the ways we express ourselves and how society views bodies."
—Book Riot
"Razor sharp. This collection allows pain to ooze off the page and gives readers something to chew on. It is an ode to queer, Black women and shows the toughness as well as the softness of these women. This work is awe-inspiring."
—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
“James is a master of song, as adept at the minimalist line as she is with sweeping lines that span the page, continually surprising with turns of phrase that are equal parts prophetic and musical. This is a tremendous first collection.”
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question
"[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
"Song of My Softening is ultimately a journey toward love and an inspection of the burdens we bear in order to arrive there, in that unknown room we can only name for ourselves. This prosodic and nuanced formation-story-in-poems leaves me both speared and softened, like the “bent knife through pear.” Which is to say: James’s poems are as sharp as the knife, as soft as the pear. I leave this book like the speaker, in paradox: punctured, wounded, but ultimately more whole.”
—Julie Marie Wade, Tupelo Quarterly
"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
"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
"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, bestselling author of Body Work and Girlhood
