Reviews

Best Barbarian: Poems by Roger Reeves

casparb's review

Go to review page

following Baldwin, who spiritually opens this collection, I find it nice to read this in the spirit of Go Tell it On the Mountain w/ the apocalyptic themes & fire fire.... enjoyed sustaining musics  

imiji's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

i found it physically impossible to read this in one sitting as i'd been originally planning to because every two poems or so i needed to put the book down to just wheeze a little bit like somebody had kicked me directly in the stomach. especially the first third or so is just FURIOUS -- not that its main modality is anger necessarily but that the way it moves just feels charged with roiling energy. the way that this book makes images orbit each other like planets in a solar system all tugging on each other gravitationally is astounding. i will be thinking about "rat among the pines" for a very long time. 

exlibrisnina's review

Go to review page

4.0

As other reviewers noted, this is pretty dense poetry. Reeves frequently references/integrates the styles and works of others, and if you're not familiar (and don't check the notes at the back), you'll be left a little lost. Not that this complexity is a bad thing- I think it forced me to spend more time thinking about each piece, rather than skimming as I may have with 'easier' poetry. It's just a little intimidating, especially if you're not a frequent poetry reader- which I am not. I don't mind having to do a little research as I read, but I also know I wasn't able to fully appreciate some of the poems because I lacked background.

I found myself most engrossed when Reeves really played with rhyme and rhythm/meter (I keep coming back to "Cocaine and Gold" for this reason). I also felt that the poems in which Reeves confronts his feelings on his father's death and police brutality to be the most impactful- particularly "After the Funeral" and "Rat Among the Pines".

My thoughts are still a little complicated, but overall I would say this collection is highly worth picking up if you’re willing to commit the time and energy to unpacking it carefully. Read them aloud, read them again and again!

rageofachilles's review

Go to review page

5.0

Best book of contemporary poetry I’ve read in some time, maybe since Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.

yourgentlemanpirate's review

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

5.0

jacob_books_corneryt's review

Go to review page

4.0

 Even though not everything connected like I wanted it to. There was enough here to be pleasantly surprise and learned a few things. 

benplatt's review

Go to review page

5.0

The word “barbarian” famously derives from the Greek word “barbaros,” an umbrella term used to reference the indistinguishable (to Greek ears) mass of foreigners outside their city states. Eventually, to not speak the language of the Greeks, to be a barbarian, evolved to encompass every trait that the Greeks, and eventually the Romans, projected onto their enemy. To be a barbarian is to be constructed as an unintelligible, alien, and inferior other; to be Grendel as opposed to Beowulf (to use one of Reeves’ many allusions, even if it’s neither Greek or Roman).

Best Barbarian is, among other things, a disruption of how white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism have created a mythology and a history exclusionary and hostile to the people whose suffering enable the history of that mythology. This collection is full of complicated entanglements with texts and ideas belied by Reeves’ vivid lyricism. This is a collection that is constantly and inventively in conversation with other texts and artists, from classical literature such as Homer and Virgil to Black contemporary artists such as Drake, Alice Coltrane, and a trio of guides to the afterlife in the form of verses from Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. The conversation between Reeves and these other artists often involves Reeves inserting their voices exactly into his own poetry as often as he’s responding to another’s work. This multi-voiced entanglement serves to clarify the reality of the poetic, historical, and musical lineage that Reeves is drawing on: that despite the canonical casting of the blood and darkness of history and the language, song, and art of communities of color into the camp of the barbarian, thus undermining it and labeling it unintelligible, Reeves’ lyrics exemplify that the voices of the barbarians are beautiful, intelligible, and inseparable from those of the hegemony. That the mythological freedom and prosperity of America is built on the blood and exploitation of Black slaves, that colonial settlement has never ended across the world by invoking the assassinated Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani, and the generational and familial history of his own family, which is complicated by histories of trauma and distance between those who love each other.

By synthesizing so many voices, some deemed canonical and some non-canonical, together along with his own, he is asserting a different, more complex history of music, society, and literature, one that exhumes from the past and the dead and that he creates in the present. Reeves’ history digs into the damage done to the so called “barbarians” of the world by the colonial and imperial core through dense, multifaceted verse that ranges in lyrical form as much as it ranges in time, scale, and intimacy. All that density, though, is miraculously contained within musical, clear language that doesn’t aim for perfect intelligibility (that’s not a goal worth aiming for imo), but that does come together as a miraculous, tangled chorus.

jewitt's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

afroabsurdist's review

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense medium-paced

5.0

savento95's review

Go to review page

5.0

I got to read an advanced copy of this book to choose excerpts for LitHub, and what a treasure it was. It's not every volume of poetry that over 80% of the poems in the book have been individually published. Reeve's conviction, his lyricism, and his presence make him a need to read.