Reeves, Roger

Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of various fellowships and awards. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton & Company), his expansive second volume, Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity – climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy, and loss. The poems 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 address itself “only to freedom.”