Miss Experience White by Milo Johnson, illustrated by John Seabury
Milo Johnson’s Miss Experience White: A Poem Cycle is a blistering, hallucinatory journey into the heart of whiteness, privilege, and the monstrous machinery of supremacy. Framed as an illustrated poetic cycle and disguised in the familiar wrapping of a children’s book, this radical autofiction detonates expectations with a potent mix of satire, surrealism, and visual subversion.
At the center of Johnson’s poetic maelstrom is the central antagonist: “Tyrannosaurus Wonderbread”—a grotesque, comic-book colossus representing white supremacy in its absurd, destructive omnipresence. The image is both ridiculous and terrifying, reflecting the paradoxes of power that Johnson seeks to dismantle. Through fierce lyricism, biting humor, and dream logic, the narrator confronts this beast not only as an external enemy but as an internal haunting—an inheritance, a shadow, a mirror.
What elevates Miss Experience White beyond polemic is its refusal to deliver easy moral certainties. Johnson writes from within the contradictions of whiteness, wielding autofiction as a tool for self-exposure and cultural critique. The “Miss Experience” persona is both a satirical construct and an emotional vessel—naïve, knowing, complicit, resisting—navigating a fractured landscape where identity, history, and complicity collide.
John Seabury’s illustrations are outstanding. Best known for his Grammy-nominated work in music art, here Seabury breaks loose with twenty full-color images that veer wildly in style—from psychedelic grotesques to pop-art pastiche to primal sketches. His artwork doesn’t just complement the text; it complicates it, adding visual riddles that dare the reader to decode or confront their own gaze. The effect is disorienting in the best sense: each page is a new terrain, a fresh hallucination with revolutionary intent.
Though its aesthetic mimics the format of a children’s book, Miss Experience White is deeply and defiantly adult. It is literature as subterfuge—a Trojan horse of nursery rhyme rhythms hiding razor-sharp critique. Fans of William Burroughs, Kara Walker, and Lynda Barry will find resonance here, though Johnson’s voice is entirely her own: caustic, vulnerable, urgent.
In a time where the language of anti-racism is often commodified or diluted, Miss Experience White offers no such comfort. Instead, it calls readers to witness, to reckon, and perhaps, to transform. Bold, bizarre, and blisteringly honest, this book is not for the faint of heart—but it is essential reading for those willing to confront the Tyrannosaurus within. A surrealist incantation and visual explosion that cracks open whiteness with wit, rage, and unsettling beauty.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
