Best Barbarian: Poems

by Roger Reeves

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.

Genres: Poetry, Race, Nonfiction, African American

120 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2022

About the author

Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing and his PhD from the University of Texas. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Reviews

[Ken]

Whew. About met my match with this collection. That is, I waded slowly, at times turning back, going over the grounds a second and third time. Can you say "dense"? Rife with allusions and hidden quotes from other sources, too (for once the "Notes" at the back of the collection were not superfluous or narcissistic).

I feel guilty saying I didn't particularly enjoy this as a whole, but happy to say that bits and pieces sung off the page, winking at me. Oh, I reread those parts, too. The parts I not only understood right away but reread as a treat for my eyes and ears, greedy parties when it comes to poetry.

Here's a poem that I cannot format properly (indentations and GR being mortal enemies... hell, indentations and HTML being mortal enemies as well) to give you a flavor of Reeves way with words. I like it best when he plays fast and loose with parts of speech, with personification, with all those things other poets call you on when they read your work unless you're established. In that case, it's OK. (Funny how that works!)


Your Hand To Your Face Blocking the Sun

Because a revelation
As the pear tree is a revelation to itself each spring

It sitting in the dead of itself and making something
That which we call pear

Though was nothing more than water and a little ache in the branches
A moan of white flowers
Rocking the green river of a tree until full

Ache
A revelation
Unaccompanied by the requisite panic

Me along the curve of you
A flower's moan
So inelegant

It will be mistaken for dirt flung into the eyes
A broken door opening
Newport knocked and floating on a puddle's gray rose
Which is how a man might describe something he loves
That will kill him

Is that how we move
When we move upon each other

As if whatever is leaving
Is the prayer we've been meaning to come to


Uh-huh. You read it and say, "Interesting." Then you reread and try to connect the dots -- poem to title, lines to stanza breaks, meaning to life.

[Dree · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those Very Literary Poetry Collections. Poems reference other poets, authors, pop culture figures, brief historical events, songs, mythology, and more. There are 6 pages of notes at the end, explaining the various references.

Personally, I like poetry I don't need to research to understand. I admit I will never keep up with the poetry world to ever be able to follow the threads of what is going on in poetry,

That said, I did have a favorite poem in this book. It does not have a note at the end. It is After the Funeral, in which an adult son at his father's funeral worries if his father's schizophrenia is lurking in himself or in his daughter. It is powerful and full of emotion and feeling--and there is no need for a note and research to make it make sense.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

My university had Roger Reeves as a visiting scholar, and I attended his poetry reading for this book as a part of one of my classes. I thought everything he read that evening was amazing, and I’m glad to finally finish his book.

If I’m remembering correctly he read “Sovereign Silence, Or The City”, “Domestic Violence”, and a few others.

[sage short · Rating 5 out of 5]

must read. must re read. must revisit often

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A triumph of allusion and poetic form. Favorites: "Fragment 107," "Rat Among the Pines," and the unparalleled "Domestic Violence." My biggest quibble is not with the collection but with the editing/publication, in that I think these poems would have benefitted with a much more expanded collection of endnotes (or even some form of interstitial footnotes). There's so much richness I feel like I'm missing simply because it's difficult to hunt down every reference while working through.

[Natalie Park · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t really understand most of these poems. As I’m newer to poetry, I’ll revisit this collection.

[Rey Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love roger reeves. i've been privileged enough to meet him a couple of times and the wisdom that he has to impart on a young creative is always astounding. similar to anne carson, he has a cerebral command of the english language and of lives past, present, and future. the emotion that he pours into each and every piece is wholly captivating and energizing to read. his references and anecdotes are always the perfect thing to elevate his work and bring it across to the reader. this new work in best barbarian has stolen my attention and i am honored to be able to read it!

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other reviewers noted, this is pretty dense poetry. Reeves frequently references/integrates the styles and works of others, and if you're not familiar (and don't check the notes at the back), you'll be left a little lost. Not that this complexity is a bad thing- I think it forced me to spend more time thinking about each piece, rather than skimming as I may have with 'easier' poetry. It's just a little intimidating, especially if you're not a frequent poetry reader- which I am not. I don't mind having to do a little research as I read, but I also know I wasn't able to fully appreciate some of the poems because I lacked background.

I found myself most engrossed when Reeves really played with rhyme and rhythm/meter (I keep coming back to "Cocaine and Gold" for this reason). I also felt that the poems in which Reeves confronts his feelings on his father's death and police brutality to be the most impactful- particularly "After the Funeral" and "Rat Among the Pines".

My thoughts are still a little complicated, but overall I would say this collection is highly worth picking up if you’re willing to commit the time and energy to unpacking it carefully. Read them aloud, read them again and again!

[Victoria]

Thanks @naia again!

I find it super difficult to rate poetry, but here are some lines/poems I want to note/remember:

Grendel: "With absolute prophecy in his breast / And a desire for mercy, for a friend, an end / To drifting in loneliness, and in that coming / Down out of the hills, out of the trees, for once, / Bringing humans the best vision of themselves, / Which, of course, must be slaughtered" (p. 16).

American Landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon: "Only in America will the sons and daughters of slaves / Kiss the sons and daughters of their masters / And remember it as an opportunity to be human" (p. 34).

Rich Black, or Best Barbarian (pp. 79-81)

American Runner: "I envy the sea / Turtle's ability to be at home while traveling / In and out of exile, in and out of the blood / Salting the ocean and paradise. / There is no terror like this: making a soul" (p. 92).

[Jack Malik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea. Probably because of the imageries, enjambments, and form. A lot of good lines but the poems fell short. The only ones I liked was “Sovereign Silence, or The City”, “Cyclops and Balthazar”, “Fragment 107”, and “Leaf-Sigh and Bray”.

[Dean Oken · Rating 5 out of 5]

the crow of my heart beats in time with my breath, great collection of words, skillfully divined

[Lewis Summers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the imagery of Reeves' poetry, but it was a bit overwhelming at times.

[Sophie Crocker · Rating 5 out of 5]

gina rec thank you gina

[Matthew Buxton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is of a scope that is unlike any i have read before - that contextualizes the history of poetry in the modern world in a way that transcends time and makes the book impossibly larger than itself. An inter textual masterpiece, roger reeves directly speaks to as well as metaphorizes Western exclusionary white canon in the context of 21st century Black Americans. He also provides rich inclusion of Black American poetic canon as a way to level the two - reconfiguring canon in a way that both challenges literature’s racist past, and finds a way to immortalize important literary figure of color along side western canon’s most revered writers. This book is about what it means to be seen as “alien,” “inferior,” and “violent,” in your own homeland. It is about reclamation.

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Revelation.

… a form of reparation.”

A 100 Notable and a Starred review – but how does poetry speak to you?

Surely, we cannot be of the same mind (mine) yet listening to Reeves in your own voice (you must read poetry at least 3 times), this best book, this Best Barbarian – how will it speak to you?

“Brilliant. Expansive.”

Will it make you wanna holla? Among the low brush – that’s it!

“Daring and formally elegant.” (it’s always about form)

Substance, lay bare.

It’s Reeves’ ability to meld classic and modern riff. Taking neither to task but that’s probably your own voice (are you still listening?) whispering, rendering meaning; me too while I read this masterpiece from the couch (out loud out loud).

Searching for a favorite I can sing out loud – I’ll read it to you from the mountaintop (go tell it) – James Baldwin appears often – he too misunderstood – presented here early on:

“All lions must lean into something other than a roar …”

For instance, singing Precious Lord

Weary.

“And bear and be whatever darkness or leaping thing we can be.”

In James Baldwin’s mouth.

“Bringing humans the best versions of themselves”

“Which, of course, must be slaughtered.”

I’ll tell you what spoke to me.

“Their hands stretched out toward the president …

… blessing the minor miracles of greater destruction.

The banning of exiles and the hungry and anyone …

Who knew the human was a breed of grief?”

I didn’t get to see Roger Reeves in Austin at the #TexasBookFestival to ask him about those who have had to leave their living for dead.

(But I’ll have these words – children listen)

“You were never meant to be human.

You must be the grass.

We must grow wildly over the grass.”

[A.L. Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long-awaited second collection from Reeves, this is one of the most impressive books of poetry I’ve read in quite a while and was certainly worth the wait. The language is pristine, perfectly polished, and it’s clear that a lot of work and care has gone into each poem. Reeves’ intellect shines through magnificently throughout this collection and has convinced me that he’s one of the most skilled and talented poets in America right now. 5/5

[arianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

your favorite poet’s favorite poetry collection. i admit to having a high standard when it comes to poetry, but this left me in awe. so many references, so dense, such a beautiful way of twisting language and form. i will probably think abt this forever

[Ben Platt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The word “barbarian” famously derives from the Greek word “barbaros,” an umbrella term used to reference the indistinguishable (to Greek ears) mass of foreigners outside their city states. Eventually, to not speak the language of the Greeks, to be a barbarian, evolved to encompass every trait that the Greeks, and eventually the Romans, projected onto their enemy. To be a barbarian is to be constructed as an unintelligible, alien, and inferior other; to be Grendel as opposed to Beowulf (to use one of Reeves’ many allusions, even if it’s neither Greek or Roman).

Best Barbarian is, among other things, a disruption of how white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism have created a mythology and a history exclusionary and hostile to the people whose suffering enable the history of that mythology. This collection is full of complicated entanglements with texts and ideas belied by Reeves’ vivid lyricism. This is a collection that is constantly and inventively in conversation with other texts and artists, from classical literature such as Homer and Virgil to Black contemporary artists such as Drake, Alice Coltrane, and a trio of guides to the afterlife in the form of verses from Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. The conversation between Reeves and these other artists often involves Reeves inserting their voices exactly into his own poetry as often as he’s responding to another’s work. This multi-voiced entanglement serves to clarify the reality of the poetic, historical, and musical lineage that Reeves is drawing on: that despite the canonical casting of the blood and darkness of history and the language, song, and art of communities of color into the camp of the barbarian, thus undermining it and labeling it unintelligible, Reeves’ lyrics exemplify that the voices of the barbarians are beautiful, intelligible, and inseparable from those of the hegemony. That the mythological freedom and prosperity of America is built on the blood and exploitation of Black slaves, that colonial settlement has never ended across the world by invoking the assassinated Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani, and the generational and familial history of his own family, which is complicated by histories of trauma and distance between those who love each other.

By synthesizing so many voices, some deemed canonical and some non-canonical, together along with his own, he is asserting a different, more complex history of music, society, and literature, one that exhumes from the past and the dead and that he creates in the present. Reeves’ history digs into the damage done to the so called “barbarians” of the world by the colonial and imperial core through dense, multifaceted verse that ranges in lyrical form as much as it ranges in time, scale, and intimacy. All that density, though, is miraculously contained within musical, clear language that doesn’t aim for perfect intelligibility (that’s not a goal worth aiming for imo), but that does come together as a miraculous, tangled chorus.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For Naima, who encouraged me to risk beauty”--Roger Reeves, about his daughter

Best Barbarian (2022) is the second poetry collection from Roger Reeves, and it is receiving the critical sensation I personally expected as I welcomed him as a colleague several years ago. I thought at the time of his job talk, in part a reading of poems that would be a part of his first collection, King Me: I’m always going to remember this moment. It was astonishing. He’s no longer my colleague, but I am glad to have slow read this collection, a kind of masterpiece of rage and wonder. He’s facing the death of his father at the time of the birth of his child,“In Rehearsal for the Funeral” which deals with new life and new death:

My daughter, barely
One, lifted over the edge of my father’s
Casket — at the edge of my father’s teeth.
All handling after death is done at the edge
Of teeth — the locust undoing the earth
To yell from the trees, and the rain, the rain,
And the smoke, smoke — and has not charity
Or light willing to light the windows
Or my father in his death, begging,
A child begging, begging to be born.

I mean, you gotta have hopes and fears when you hold a child.

So Reeves writes of grief and ecstasy, the Jekyll and Hyde life of the soul. The poems range in register and tone, from formal to informal; inventive, playful, or formally challenging. And erudite; some can be tough to get into. The poems speak to a variety of poetic and intellectual traditions. There’s a poem that reminded me of a contemporary black poet’s Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, full of references to other texts and the world of violence against black men, shepherded by spirit guides Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

Amazing. Difficult. I spent a couple hours on that poem alone. And will read it again. Emmitt Till through George Floyd runs through this collection, everywhere, images, names, lives of anguish and rage, held up against the wonders of his wife and daughter. There are jazz poems for John and Alice Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, so many artists and activists. A poem of sexual ecstasy, an ode to political and love poet Neruda, written for his wife. A poem about selfies that wishes for selfies with Frederick Douglas and Jack Johnson. So many poems about children, past and present and future. Powerful and challenging.

His final words in “For Black Children at the End of the World — and at the Beginning”:

Black Child, you are the walking-on-of-water
Without the need of an approving master.
You are in a beautiful language.
You are what lies beyond this kingdom
And the next and the next and fire. Fire, Black Child.

Roger Reeves reading from his book:

https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=...

[Hollis · Rating 5 out of 5]

"'I was born with water in my voice,'" (from "Domestic Violence")

"Domestic Violence" is possibly my new favorite poem ever. Reading it reminded me of James Joyce's "Circe," simply as an experience of coming across a mode of writing that feels so totally of its own creative force. Essentially a prose poem, the poem represents Reeves investments in repetition and the folk archive, developing a narrative of Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton guiding Louis Till through the afterlife (featuring some not-so-subtle referencing to Ezra Pound). In the poem, the three women approximate the witches of Hamlet:

'We are what is the what-not,
The ever shimmying out of the never-wound.
Louis, do you follow or do you fall,'
They said. 'Are you short or is you tall?'

The narrative is interesting, in in part because of its little-known history, that the father of Emmett Till was hung in a military trial for evidently raping an Italian woman while serving for WWII activity abroad (John Wideman wrote at length of why this prosecution should be doubted, but I'm not committed either way beyond finding it to be a profoundly tragic piece of historical happenstance--if that's the right word [it's not]).

"The rider laughed and threw his head
Backward and there a wound, too, where his neck
Coupled with the skull, and the wound spoke
But not the speech of the mouth but the speech of reason
But not the reason of Plato, Virgil, Foucault
Or the stars maddening the night with their bursts
Of madness, their dying in the night's hair,
But the reason of the spear that pierces
The skull and slides through the chin, letting
The darkness down, letting all the darkness down."

Much of this collection is indebted to the gravity of biblical diction. There is always some tension in the relationship between the source and the final text, in this case at least. Domestic violence is the perfect name for the piece. Violence begets further violence. The racial slips so naturally into the gendered, and yet, without recourse. In language, the poem is indebted to the weight of water as a tumultuous current. As one line speaks, "No harm lasts; we live forever in our wounds." As far as epics go, its only 10 pages, and yet, I struggle to pin its meaning to the page. Its a piece of writing that legitimates my relation to the afterlife, and thus, its difficult to measure its true impact.

Other Favorites: "Grendel" / "Without the Pelt of a Lion" / "The Broken Fields Mended" / "After Death" / "Cyclops and Balthazar" / "The End of Ghassan Kanafani" / "Something About John Coltrane" / "American Runner" / "Past Barabbas" / "As a Child of North America"

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I WAS ALREADY planning to read this, but Reeves's essay in Granta, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind," bumped it up to the top of my list. As the variety of honors it has received suggests, it is excellent.

As in Zadie Smith's successful re-boots of Forster (On Beauty), Chaucer (The Wife of Willesden), and Dickens (The Fraud), Reeves engages deftly with some Anglo canonical influences (T. S. Eliot in "Poem, in an Old Language," Yeats in "As a Child of North America," Beowulf in a couple of poems about Grendel) while foregrounding a Black cultural inheritance (Phyllis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, John and Alice Coltrane, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Jericho Brown). It's a heady brew, but he drinks it down and does not even wobble.

Take, for instance, the first of the two long poems at the book's center, "Domestic Violence," which appropriates the trip to the underworld in Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid as well as Pound's and Eliot's appropriations of that topos, then pivots on the astonishing datum that the Louis Till who figures in Pound's Pisan Cantos was the father of Emmett Till ("Yes, that Emmett Till," Reeves writes in the notes), taking the poem suddenly into the gravest urgencies of the present.

(I'm still trying to figure out whether the second long poem in the middle of the book, "Something about John Coltrane," is in dialogue with Michael S. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane." It might be...but I'm not sure.)

Recurring images--field, tree, blood--give the book a mysterious unity. Those images may be connected--seem to be connected, in a way I don't understand-- to the most intimate poems of the book, those about the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, especially "After Death."

[amanda abel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Reeves is brilliant, and I am not on his level! With that said, I found this collection to be immensely rewarding if challenging. I tried not to read more than ten pages or so at a time, and I really needed that in order to process and sift through the references and meaning. He has written a book that is in conversation with many other poets and writers, both living and dead. I kept a bookmark in the Notes section and flipped back and forth between nearly every poem to get more info. I would have loved to be able to read the poems and be clued in within the poem itself to some of these references (footnotes on the page of the poem really would have helped), but I have to think this is by design and he wants us to work for it. Most of the time I was reading these, it reminded me of working through TS Eliot in grad school. The density and length of the poems and length of the collection are somewhat prohibitive, which is why I rated this 4 stars rather than 5. The poems I got the most out of were the shorter ones that didn’t run more than two pages; beyond that and I often found myself lost. I believe Roger Reeves is one of the greatest living poets of our time, and I hope people will take a chance on this work. As for me, I will be going back to it and working through one poem at a time, probably annotating as I go.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in awe of Reeves' use of the image. Like the image is in that Deep Image tradition, but differently employed. If the Deep Image poets of the 1970s looked to the noun-ness of the image, then Reeves is in for the verb following from that noun. Or the verb that grows like kudzu out of that noun. Or the verb that get kneaded out of the noun, as his poems push and consider and reconsider their underlying subject or scenario. It reminds me a lot of Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Where her image is more than just a moment in the poem, or her image is not a destination the poem will reach, it is the poem's larger context. It shades the poem. It is the poem's soil.

But Reeves is different from Kelly, I think, in the poem's construction. Reeves' poems speak from a larger historical context. Which is not to discount how personally driven they are. The poems about his daughter and fatherhood are beautiful. But there is a way that Kelly inhabited a mythical world unique to her, and I think Reeves mythos reckons with the history of being black in the United States.

[Ana Paula Reyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poema que me llegó: Oda a la Oda al Limón de Pablo Neruda

“Out of lemon flowers loosed on the moonlight,”
Me touching the “barbarous gold” with my mouth—
“The breast and nipple.” To fall into the world as this
Yellow clamoring of God—is this not ecstasy— Lying in bed with ink, book, and lemons,
Mouth to the lemons, to ink, me, lashed and lashed
By a poet whose revenge against the State is cutting
Open a piece of yellow fruit slowly in front of it;
The juice, in its bizarre light and running
Along the Senate floor, is the exile’s homeland
Beyond burning and exile. “The harbors Are big with it.”
Death hangs fire at the water’s edge
Ready to become a field of smoke with you in it,
But there in your pocket, a lemon and a knife— The rind pierced, the sound of which is a statehouse
Burning, ash without its requisite singing. Now sing.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Head of the Cottonmouth

Why would I abandon the hunger-suffering

Vulture, spread-winged in the middle of the road

Eating a rabbit while it snows? Wouldn’t you

Want to touch, watch his comrades close down the sky

And, in a black circle, eat red on the white Earth?

And when the hiss of something slithers in—

Panic un-paused—wouldn’t you watch the circle

Break into black leaves pulled from the earth and flung

Into the falling sky? Wouldn’t you want to be

A servant of this paradise, not a God

In front of a screen, naked, lonely, asking—

No more a God than the crown of vultures

Frightened by a hiss that was a tire deflating?

Why would you trade Paradise for an argument

About Paradise?

[Tauwan Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Like a bottle of fine wine…”

The back of this book comes adorned with high praise and fine words for the poems contained within. And for a minute there I was like “yeah… I guess” as I began to dive in to this here collection. The poems were… fine. Seemed too pleased with themselves and what they can do, too abstract. And then, slowly but surely, such thoughts began to fade and the magic and artistry in these poems began to reveal themselves to me. This is special work presented here if you choose to sit with it, not be intimidated, and bare witness to the intelligence, grit, and black history being laid out before you on the page.

[Ryan Madden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm hoping to read more poetry and so I picked up this book from the library because it won the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize (as well as other prizes).

I'm not really sure how to rate a poetry collection. I really liked some of the poems in this book. Some of them I felt were really amazing. So I understand why this won the award.

That said, I didn't love them all, but I'm not sure if that is a realistic bar to set for poetry. Anyway, I settled on 3 stars. I liked it, and I would recommend it for those curious. If I continue to read more poetry collections I'll have a better idea where a particular book lands.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

National Book Award 2022 Read:

I’m not a dumb person. I’m educated. I have multiple degrees. I read constantly. I teach.

That being said, poetry like this makes me feel dumb. I read this from cover to cover and I couldn’t tell you what I read beyond a few themes. I read it aloud and appreciated some of the sound devices, but the meaning was totally lost on me. The collection comes with end notes about history, mythology, poetry, current events, etc. That was somewhat helpful.

This review says it all: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Aisha Monet]

This book really demands your time; you don’t have much of a choice, but to take it slow because of how layered and dense and beautiful the language.

Definitely a collection that demands a re-read because there’s no way to comprehend all the references in one sitting or really sit with the emotions that the poet is leading us through. Something really special about the book is how much you can hear the poet’s voice, how strong and unique it is. If you’ve ever heard Reeves read, you can almost hear tenor in between the lines.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well deserving the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. As oracular as it is free ranging, from exploding the canon and far beyond, from Grendel in Beowolf to Baldwin and Beyonce.

Listen to him read “Children Listen”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEb7S.... To be deeply read and re-read.

"'I was born with water in my voice”
"Domestic Violence"

"Who knew the human was a breed of grief?"
"Without The Pelt of a Lion"