In this riveting debut, Reeves argues that black history is human history, and the suffering belongs to all of us.

Winner of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry A New York Times Notable Book “Terrific.… [Reeves] expands literary tradition so that new political ideas, self-revelation and play can thrive.” —Sandra Simonds, New York Times Book Review 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. 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.

* WINNER OF THE 2024 GLCA NEW WRITERS AWARD FOR CREATIVE NONFICTION * A crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in—especially in—these dark days In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down. Together, these groundbreaking essays build a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground. “The peace we fight and search for,” Reeves writes, “begins and ends with being still.”

From the website: Francis Bacon put it best: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Novelist and critic Marilynn Robinson brilliantly essays the notion of beauty and its role in our changing society. Poet Crystal Williams views the subject through the kaleidoscopic lens of race, while Aimee Bender talks with the artist Amy Cutler, whose off-kilter, imaginative work boils in the same cauldron as Bender's fictions. The poets, naturally, are well-represented here, happily joining the ancient poetic cause. And just as unsurprisingly, the prose writers turn the notions of beauty inside-out. Maggie Shipstead chronicles a former child star's fall from drug-addled "It Girl." Michel Houellebecq sinks his teeth into the art world. And Eric Puchner spins a youth-only future. We are also delighted by beautiful math, Mumbai bar dancers, the science of sex, and even the letters of Burt Reynolds. We hope you find the issue as beautiful as strange and beautiful as we do.