Best Barbarian: Poems
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry
A New York Times Notable Book
“Terrific.… [Reeves] expands literary tradition so that new political ideas, self-revelation and play can thrive.” —Sandra Simonds, New York Times Book Review
In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award–winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity—climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss.
The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man.
Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with—and sometimes contradicting—Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to a long song that seeks to address itself “only to freedom.”
Best Barbarian asks the reader to stay close as it plunges into catastrophe and finds surprising moments of joy and intimacy. This fearless, musical, and oracular collection announces Roger Reeves as an essential voice in American poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The mesmerizing second collection from Reeves (King Me) reflects intergenerational racial trauma and personal tragedy with a remarkable balance of acute feeling and lyrical precision. These poems powerfully allude to the ways in which racial atrocity is sewn into the fabric of America. Referencing the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 Birmingham, which killed four children, he explains how they continue "to haunt the plate of the nation, to travel in the husk/ And ears of corn going to market, to sit on the Senators' plates" ("The End of Ghassan Kanafani"). Throughout, there is a stoic lack of sensationalism that makes violence and grief even more palpable. In the biblical "Domestic Violence," a speaker navigates the "AfterLife" with a man named Ezra as his guide, encountering the spirits of formerly enslaved people and giving voice to the impulse of rebellion against the white supremacist state: "And when all the voices/ sound like the police, I said, kill all the voices." Yet there are also moments of joy expressed with imagery that is beautiful in its specificity, "the sun slipping/ Into a boy's pocket and warming an unpeeled orange." With vivid images and haunting, evocative language, Reeves memorably places the reader in the space where life and death intersect.
