Best Barbarian Poems

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.)

"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