Best Barbarian: Poems

by Roger Reeves

Overview

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

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393609332
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	301,008
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Grendel 15

Without the Pelt of a Lion 18

Children Listen 20

Standing in the Atlantic 21

The Alphabet, for Naima 23

In Rehearsal for the Funeral 25

Sovereign Silence, or The City 26

Cocaine and Gold 29

Rat Among the Pines 31

American Landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon 33

Into the West 35

The Broken Fields Mended 36

After the Funeral 39

Echo: From the Mountains 41

So, Ecstasy 42

After Death 44

Cyclops and Balthazar 46

Mother's Day 47

Second Plague Year, Black Spots on the Rose 49

Poem, In an Old Language 51

The End of Ghassan Kanafani 54

Domestic Violence 57

Something About John Coltrane 68

Ode to Pablo Nerudas "Ode to a Lemon" 78

Rich Black, or Best Barbarian 79

Prayer of the Jaguar 82

Drapetomania, or James Baldwin As an Improvisation 84

Grendel's Mother 86

"Espíritu Santo También …" 88

Fragment 107 89

American Runner 91

Past Barabbas 93

My Folks 94

Leaf-Sigh and Bray 96

Caught in a Black Doorway 98

As a Child of North America 100

Future, from Beyond the Voice of God 102

By Beauty, from Beyond the Voice of God 104

Your Hand to Your Face Blocking the Sun 106

I Can Drink the Distance, or Fire in the Lake 107

Journey to Satchidananda 108

For Black Children at the End of the World-and the Beginning 110

Acknowledgments 112

Notes 115

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/21/2022

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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

"[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."

Poetry Foundation - Heather Green

"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

"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

"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."

New York Times Book Review - Sandra Simonds

★ 05/01/2022

"Sometimes you can be made more than your body/ While still in your body. Now, that's power." Reeves's haunting second collection (after King Me) crafts a sweeping and powerful poetic topography. The poems encounter and reencounter suffering, grief, and violence across personal and political history, particularly U.S. history with its myths of innocence and its foundations in atrocity. The coexistence of tenderness, love, and wonder threads the work with tension and complexity ("And someone calling/ It beautiful—summer, moon—/ And someone dying beneath that beauty,/ Which is America's "), as does the impulse to converse. Poems engage with presences ranging from Sappho to James Baldwin to a deceased father. "Where is the end of speaking to the dead/ Of the brutal obligations of memory?" Perhaps there is no end, the poems imply, as the present reveals itself permeated by past and future, elegy and hope. "Children/ You were never meant to be human/ You must be the grass/ You must grow wildly over the graves." VERDICT Rich and cohesive, with remarkable depth and lyrical command, this work offers manifold discoveries. A book that reveals more with each reading.—Amy Dickinson

Library Journal

"[I] found myself in awe of [Roger Reeves’s] intellect, poetic prowess, big heart, and the movements of [his] mind."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Victoria Chang

"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

"Vivid, haunting poems written with lyrical precision and elegiac intensity."

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