Winner of the 2023 Griffin Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardFinalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work PoetryA New York Times Notable BookTerrific. [Reeves] expands literary tradition so that new political ideas, self-revelation and play can thrive. Sandra Simonds, New York Times Book ReviewIn his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Awardwinning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanityclimate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss.The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulfs 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 anothers want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled? Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing withand sometimes contradictingWalt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aim Csaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyonc, 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.
