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Best Barbarian : poems / Roger Reeves.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2022]Edition: First editionDescription: 120 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780393609332
  • 0393609332
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
Grendel -- Without the pelt of a lion -- Children listen -- Standing in the Atlantic -- The 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 -- The 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 -- The 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 -- "Espíritu santo también..." -- 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.
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.
List(s) this item appears in: Poetry Month
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 811.6 R332 Available 33111010836043
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Includes bibliographical references.

Grendel -- Without the pelt of a lion -- Children listen -- Standing in the Atlantic -- The 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 -- The 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 -- The 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 -- "Espíritu santo también..." -- 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.

"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.

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