Best Barbarian: Poems

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.

Author: Roger Reeves
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 03/22/2022
Pages: 120
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.30h x 6.30w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780393609332


Award: National Book Awards - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/21/2022
Library Journal 05/01/2022 pg. 92

About the Author
Reeves, Roger: - Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2015 Whiting Award, among other honors. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.