Roger Reeves's King Me PDF

On the “Best Poetry Books of the 12 months” record from Library Journal

“A subtle and breathtaking author, Reeves takes the reader on a harrowing trip: each one poem comes filled with arresting imagery, relentless in its exam of the way tragedy and trauma turn into internalized — cleansing out the injuries to appreciate the pain.”—Los Angeles assessment of Books

“Roger Reeves' King Me stitches jointly many worlds into one startling and visceral booklet. His ranging, encyclopedic wisdom crosses historical past, medication, biology, metapoetics and extra, yet he tackles all of it with a daring and sonorous surrealist flow.”—American Microreviews

From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett until to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the compelled famines in Poland within the Thirties, King Me examines the erotics of care and where of track, elegy, and compliment as testaments to these moments. As Roger Reeves stated in an interview, "While writing King Me, I grew to become very attracted to the mythology of king, the one that is sacrificed on the finish of the harvest season. . . . For me, the parable manifests within the killing of younger black males, Emmett until, and within the methods the US deems younger, black male our bodies as expendable—Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. those are the younger kings whom we like to kill—over and over again."

From "Some younger Kings":

The hummingbirds within 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 within the meadow. And Dorothy's on my own within the corn with Jack, his black arms, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs till she howls—Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker . . .

Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener heart for artistic Writing and his PhD from the college of Texas. His poems have seemed in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review. He teaches on the college of Illinois, Chicago.