– Finalist for the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize, 2025

– Finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry - Publishing Triangle, 2025

– Semi-finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2025

– Finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry, 2025

– One of Debutiful’s 10 best books of 2024

– One of Electric Literature’s 10 best books of 2024

– Selected 2024 Roundups: CLMP, The Rumpus, Book Riot, Debutiful, ARTFORUM

– Additional Coverage in The Library Journal (starred review), The Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, NPR: Morning Edition, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Cosmopolitan, BOMB Magazine, Shondaland, USA Today, Ms. Magazine, Lavender Magazine, Adroit Journal, Columbia Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Read Poetry, Book Riot, TPQ, Water~Stone Review, Lambda Literary Review and elsewhere

“Tender, beautiful, stark, painful—”

— Leila Fadel, NPR’s Morning Edition

I had to wait more than a year to read her first full-length collection, “Song of My Softening”; it was entirely worth it. 

Her poems explore the experiences of a Black queer woman whose life and body are routinely dismissed and disparaged. But she persists until she can sing in full-throated celebration, “Today we are alive / in summer. Unencumbered.” This is an intimate, vulnerable and ultimately triumphant collection.

— Ron Charles, Washington Post

“The insightful debut by James explores the body and identity with bracing honesty and directness…Often transgressive and always enlightening, this provocative collection confronts what it means to see and be seen, to consume and be consumed.”

— Publisher’s Weekly

“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 Sarah Michaelis, Library Journal

“One of the most exciting poetry debuts in recent memory.”

— Kaveh Akbar

“In her debut poetry collection, Song of my Softening, Omotara James carves out a hard-earned way of knowing: a way of seeing through the language we've been given to a clear understanding of self, of body, of being. Her voice and these poems move with a surefooted and sensual grace through pain and shame toward abundance and a tender truth-telling. Hers is an eye that doesn't shy away. She lifts what the world has hidden in shadow up to the light and lets it shimmer.”

— Camille Rankine, Author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses

"One of the defining poets of her generation…Omotara deepens the unsaid with such brilliant sonic resonances, hinting at truths too complex to tell any other way, which is what poetry can do. And does in each poem in this astonishing book."

— Idra Novey

“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

“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

"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

“I love these poems. Song of My Softening is spectacular. It is really, really lovely.”

— Elizabeth Scanlon, The American Poetry Review podcast

“Song of My Softening builds upon the legacy of Whitman’s Song of Myself and its celebration of the body, flawed and messy and beautiful. Omotara James is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting debut voices of the year.”

— Ronnie K. Stephens, TPQ

"[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 by Omotara James is a fierce tour-de-force by a debut voice who I’m certain will be around to continue to thrill readers with her language, vulnerability and bravado."

— Joseph O. Legaspi, Water~Stone Review

“Song of My Softening is heavily informed by the turmoil of our time and yet James’ optimism and joy sparkle on the page.”

— Buer Carlie, Lavender Magazine