Book

Best Barbarian : poems / Roger Reeves.

Summary:

"An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster. 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. Drawing on a history of poetry that ranges from the Aeneid to Walt Whitman to Drake, Best Barbarian offers moments of joy and intimacy amid catastrophe"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 9780393609332
ISBN: 0393609332
Physical Description: 120 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: First Edition.
Publisher: New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2022]
Copyright: ℗♭2022

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references.

Formatted Contents Note:

Grendel -- Without the pelt of a lion -- Children listen -- Standing in the Atlantic -- Alphabet, for Naima -- In rehearsal for the funeral -- Sovereign silence, or The city -- Cocaine and gold -- Rat among the pines -- American landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon -- Into the West -- Broken fields mended -- After the funeral -- Echo: from the mountains -- so, Ecstasy -- After death -- Cyclops and Balthazar -- Mother's Day -- Second plague year, black spots on the rose -- Poem, in an old language -- End of Ghassan Kanafani -- Domestic violence -- Something about John Coltrane -- Ode to Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a lemon" -- Rich Black, or Best barbarian -- Prayer of the jaguar -- Drapetomania, or James Baldwin as an improvisation -- Grendel's mother -- "Esp©Ưritu santo tambi©♭n..." -- Fragment 107 -- American runner -- Best Barabbas -- My Folks -- Leaf-Sigh and Bray -- Caught in a Black doorway -- As a child of North America -- Future, from beyond the voice of God -- By beauty, from beyond the voice of God -- Your hand to your face blocking the sun -- I can drink the distance, or Fire in the lake -- Journey to Satchidananda -- For Black children at the end of the world--and the beginning.