Roger Reeves, _King Me_

BEST BARBARIAN (2022), Reeves's second collection, was so good that I decided his first was worth a shot. King Me, published in 2013, is very nearly as good. 

It has the kind of audacity one often sees in strong young poets (especially strong young male poets, I would say), a little bit of "watch what I can do with...this!". A lot of syntactical gymnastics, a lot of astonishing imagery, a lot of erudite code-switching. Reeves, thank goodness, can actually pull this sort of thing off. Here is the beginning of "Maggot Therapy":

Not the debridement of the wound--the wedding

Dress decanted of the bones and snow-blown skin

Of a bride circling through the splinters of winter,

The ash and orchard of a gray heaven surrounding

The tumble of guests leaking out into the night

To wish her sloughing off of dress and wound well--

No, not this debridement, which is greeted with cake

And cymbal and the calling on of a mastering god, [...]

The sentence goes on for another eighteen lines, right to the end of the poem, but just about the time I was thinking Reeves was showing off a bit as he spun out this disambiguating explanation, it turned out the wound in need of cleaning was made by Reeves's brother's suicide--"eat around the bullet still thrumming against / the salt and clatter of a brother's brain [...]". The topic of mortality shunts us into a quick detour through Hamlet ("maggot how lightly you travel / Through the ribs of beggars and barns, kings and convents"), but we are still talking about debridement, since doctors often placed maggots in wounds to consume necrotic tissue back in the day. And then the poem tones down, but becomes all the more powerful as its language becomes simpler and more subdued:

Teach me again that I do not own this body

That walks me over this snow and cracked pavement,

The winter light pulling at my bare ankles, teach me

What to do with the dead I carry in my mouth,

Teach me to travel light with their bodies in my belly.

Not every poem in the book is as striking as "Maggot Therapy," and the verbal fireworks do sometimes seem to be set off for their own sake. But Reeves was writing strong poems right out of the gate.