King Me - Softcover

Reeves, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556594488 ISBN 13: 9781556594489

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2013

Synopsis

On the “Best Poetry Books of the Year" list from Library Journal

“A sophisticated and breathtaking writer, Reeves takes the reader on a harrowing journey: each poem comes packed with arresting imagery, relentless in its examination of how tragedy and trauma become internalized — cleaning out the wounds to understand the pain."—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Roger Reeves' King Me stitches together many worlds into one startling and visceral book. His ranging, encyclopedic knowledge crosses history, medicine, biology, metapoetics and more, but he tackles it all with a bold and sonorous surrealist flow."—American Microreviews

From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. . . . For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable—Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. These are the young kings whom we love to kill—over and over again."

From "Some Young Kings":

The hummingbirds inside my chest,with their needle-nosed pliers for tonguesand hammer-heavy wings, have left a messof ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullabyin my throat. Little boy blue come blowyour horn. The cow's in the meadow. And Dorothy's alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs until she howls—Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker . . .

Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing and his PhD from the University of Texas. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

About this title

About the Author

Roger Reeves: Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas and an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review.

Reviews

Adorned with a Basquiat painting on the cover, Reeves’ collection is a beautiful and thought-provoking look at race, identity, the South, and Christianity. Heavily influenced by pop culture and the Western canon—from Wu Tang and Mike Tyson to Keats and Neruda—these playful poems are shaped by recurring characters, including Jesus, and a fascination with herons. The formatting of Kletic of Walt Whitman, the Wound Dresser forces the reader’s eye to move about; there are two definition poems, explicating Cymothoa exigua and Schistosoma mansoni; and a series of Exit Interview poems. The title, King Me, is from Self-Portrait as Ernestine ‘Tiny’ Davis: Call me hippo. Call this woman beneath me / a broken boat, … / Feed me. Call my appetites a kind kingdom. / Call me queen. King me. But the true voice of the collection is forged in such poems as Some Young Kings and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence: When I kissed the old woman’s cheeks, / I tried to leave what little honey I had eaten that morning. Reeves’ meaningful poems are smart without being pretentious. --Mark Eleveld

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556594488
• ISBN 13: 9781556594489
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72