Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, among other honors. He lives in Austin, Texas.
"Best Barbarian, Roger Reeves’s terrific second collection,
eruditely sets out to unite the Western literary canon with its
omissions and oppressions... What I find most moving in this
collection is the way fatherhood frames Reeves’s sense of the
future and his reworking of the past."
*Sandra Simonds - New York Times Book Review*
"[A] substantial and prodigiously intertextual new collection...
Names, quotes, and allusions [are] fundamental elements of the warp
and weft of the net of Reeves’s verse, and his own art is both
adroit and capacious enough to probe or connect, to complicate or
amplify all he catches there... Amid the brutalities of abuse,
death, and decay, these poems both apprehend and enact a sometimes
terrifying beauty."
*Heather Green - Poetry Foundation*
"Roger Reeves conjures the losses—no, the thefts—at the root of the
American story. Best Barbarian is a revelation and a form
of reparation."
*Tracy K. Smith*
"Best Barbarians is a twenty-first-century masterpiece. Borrowing
and turning on its head the Western canon’s repeated warnings of
civilization’s fall, Roger Reeves counters that the apocalypse ran
contiguously with the inception and height of Western civilization
because the white man’s rise was contingent upon the destruction of
Black personhood. From that perspective, Reeves sees America as a
necropolis to which he leads us—like Virgil—down into the
underworld, where we meet the shades of Emmett Till, Oya, and Ezra
Pound, among others. Best Barbarians is rich, intertextual,
brilliant, and unforgettable."
*Cathy Park Hong*
"I cannot overstate the brilliance of Roger Reeves. A sentence
inside a Reeves poem is a score of breath; a scripture with texture
and subtext; a tightrope of expansive, existential syntax. Best
Barbarian is a monumental and elegiac tour de force. Peerless and
unprecedented, it is one of the best books I’ve read in years."
*Terrance Hayes*
"From Grendel to Gilgamesh, Best Barbarian reviews and retells the
most ancient of stories so that Roger Reeves can tell his own. The
capaciousness of these elegiac poems, their Whitmanian need to hold
and see it all, mirrors this speaker’s need to be known fully as a
black father, a man in love, a surviving citizen, a son to his
mother, and an investigator of his father’s whereabouts even after
death. This book is an education on this history of the soul."
*Jericho Brown*
"Best Barbarian is a wide-ranging, capacious, and deeply felt
meditation on ruptures, the violences enacted across time and
space, where myth and history collide. Through dazzling riffs and
leaps of imagination across linguistic registers, Roger Reeves
offers an alchemy for repair. The sheer musicality of the
language—the way resilience and love sing—makes a once-broken thing
even more beautiful."
*Natasha Trethewey*
"The mesmerizing second collection from Reeves reflects
intergenerational racial trauma and personal tragedy with a
remarkable balance of acute feeling and lyrical precision… With
vivid images and haunting, evocative language, Reeves memorably
places the reader in the space where life and death intersect."
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
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