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 US-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 Aime Cesaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and The Aeneid to Drake and Beyonce, 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.

About the Author
Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, among other honors. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Reviews
"Best Barbarian, Roger Reeves's terrific second collection, eruditely sets out to unite the Western literary canon with its omissions and oppressions...What I find most moving in this collection is the way fatherhood frames Reeves's sense of the fut" -- Sandra Simonds - The New York Times Book Review


Awards
Commended for National Book Awards (Poetry) 2022.



Book Information
ISBN 9781324064459
Author Roger Reeves
Format Paperback
Page Count 128
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 139g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 155mm * 10mm