Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea - by Khadijah Queen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

We stay fighting, even if we don't call it war.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a poet's memoir about family, survival, and one servicewoman's search for autonomy. Yanked out of college and torn from her sunny hometown of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Khadijah Queen finds herself sharing a basement apartment with her mother and sister and working two retail jobs in snowy, tiny Inkster, Michigan. Longing to escape the cycle of her family's poverty, incarceration, and addiction, she joins the US Navy, determined to earn money to finish college and make it back to L.A. on her own terms.

But soon after Queen completes her grueling training and boards a doomed destroyer, she finds herself faced with near-constant sexual harassment, demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism. Stuck on a ship with nowhere to hide, she looks to poetry, literature, and letters from home to get through the long days and maintain her dignity. She keeps her head down until the workplace hostility against women spills over into her dating life and threatens to derail everything she has worked for.

In trying to break through the unspoken code of silence between sailors, Queen must decide where her loyalties lie: with the Navy or within herself. Unflinching and masterfully penned, this memoir questions the promises of service to reveal the true price of being a woman at sea.

Review Quotes

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a breathtaking act of truth-telling--a fierce, unflinching anthem for every woman who's ever been underestimated, overworked, or overlooked. Khadijah Queen's voice is raw and wise, furious and tender, resilient and unrelenting in a way that only poets can pull off. She shows how the systems we serve, whether the military or the criminal justice system, were not built for us, nor are they capable of holding our complexity, our pain, or our power. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is for every woman who has ever been told to sit down, shut up, or smile through the pain. This isn't just a memoir--it's a reckoning."--Lara Love Hardin, New York Times bestselling author of The Many Lives of Mama Love

"Khadijah Queen writes with majestic grace about growing up the hard way, in sometimes searing circumstances, and then joining the Navy to pay for college. We watch in awe as she chases down her dream, undeterred by the many obstacles placed in her way, to become a literary star. This book is a testament to her grit, resolve, and unstoppable drive, and offers yet another example of Queen's blazing talent. This memoir shimmers, it is so good."--Helen Thorpe, author of Just Like Us, Soldier Girls, The Newcomers, and Finding Motherland

"Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea is yet another extension of the brilliant universe of Khadijah Queen, one where the pages are richly populated. With people, with places, with rich, granular details. And, with all of that population, still, an attention to and affection for each single part of the larger machine, which makes Queen's narrative world-building feel like it is reaching for you, demanding you to enter, and be walked through each place, each life, each passage of time. This book is a gift." --Hanif Abdurraqib, MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award finalist, and author of There's Always This Year and A Little Devil in America

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. .