Roger Reeves
“I think one can only write out of one's obsessions. If one is obsessed with flowers, one will write about flowers. If one is obsessed with finger puppets, one will write about finger puppets. My obsession happens to be the intersection of politics, subjectivity, aesthetics and race.”
“Proceeding in prayerlike incantation, “Best Barbarian,” Roger Reeves’s terrific second collection, eruditely sets out to unite the Western literary canon with its omissions and oppressions. These poems resurrect an eclectic cast of characters, from Sappho to James Baldwin, to reflect on the poet’s vital yet unanswerable question: “What disaster will I deliver to my daughter?” From playful abecedarians to a psychedelic “durational” poem (which, when read aloud, is roughly the length of the Alice Coltrane song that inspired it) the reader traverses a sonic landscape from elegy to ecstasy.”
“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.”
“A sophisticated and breathtaking writer, Reeves takes the reader on a harrowing journey: each poem comes packed with arresting imagery, relentless in its examination of how tragedy and trauma become internalized—cleaning out the wounds to understand the pain.”
“Adorned with a Basquiat painting on the cover, Reeves’ collection is a beautiful and thought-provoking look at race, identity, the South, and Christianity. Heavily influenced by pop culture and the Western canon—from Wu Tang and Mike Tyson to Keats and Neruda—these playful poems are shaped by recurring characters, including Jesus, and a fascination with herons...Reeves’ meaningful poems are smart without being pretentious.”
“King me” is an expression from the game of checkers, declared when one player’s piece reaches the opponent’s end of the board and is “kinged,” allowing it a much greater range of movement. Reeves’s debut begins with that demand, a bold but risky gambit. Reeves is interested in the intersection of politics and the personal...Reeves is one to watch.”
Roger Reeves's most recent book is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction and a finalist for the 2024 Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism. He is also the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Tracy K. Smith called it “a revelation and a form of reparation.” His debut collection is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University, a Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships.
Asked by Ru Freeman in the Huffington Post if he felt there was a particular universality in his work, Reeves responded, “No, I don't believe my work is particularly universal. I don't agree or believe in the universal. Many critics have argued this point so I will only say this: often, when we use the term universal, we secretly and not-so secretly mean white and white cultural epistemes. That's why I resist the term.”
He earned a BA in English from Morehouse College, an MA in English from Texas A&M University, an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.
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