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King Me
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.
“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.
72 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 12, 2013
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About the author
Roger Reeves
12 books54 followersRoger 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
January 1, 2020
Today I went to find van Gogh after reading Roger Reeves' poem, "Self-Portrait as Vincent van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles:"
Father, forgive me
for the moths shrieking in the orchard of my mouth
I couldn't find van Gogh because I was wooed by Monet, he who never ceases to make me smile even when I feel sad; his short, calming brushstrokes: pale hues of green and blue scenery, a non-visible sun somewhere, sketches of freedom in land and air and water.
This is a chapbook that refuses to be defined; although, alas, it must be placed in some four or five sentence paragraphic definition after publication, right? I've seen descriptions that state this is poetry that examines "appalling acts of humanity." I've seen "poverty" and "race." Meanwhile, I'm reading between lines of deep self-examination and melancholy. I'm also uncovering an ode to family (and the displacement of), a visceral response to the calamity of mental health.
From: "Of Genocide, or Merely Sound"
I belong to the silence of a pomegranate
just cut open, the red seeds
pebbling a white plate.
Point is, there are so many enjoyable themes in this collection. The lines are adroitly served so that you sense you are reading poetry from one who is a teacher and student of the craft. The language is profound. What I enjoyed most was the soft and supple feel of these words that made me carry them around, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Philadelphia Academy of Music. I couldn't spend the holidays with family this year, so I chose to spend it with art. And I didn't have my end-of-year-reading with D.H. Lawrence, like I normally do, but I enjoyed the time spent with Roger Reeves.
(Happy New Year fellow GoodReads friends. Best wishes to you and yours).
Father, forgive me
for the moths shrieking in the orchard of my mouth
I couldn't find van Gogh because I was wooed by Monet, he who never ceases to make me smile even when I feel sad; his short, calming brushstrokes: pale hues of green and blue scenery, a non-visible sun somewhere, sketches of freedom in land and air and water.
This is a chapbook that refuses to be defined; although, alas, it must be placed in some four or five sentence paragraphic definition after publication, right? I've seen descriptions that state this is poetry that examines "appalling acts of humanity." I've seen "poverty" and "race." Meanwhile, I'm reading between lines of deep self-examination and melancholy. I'm also uncovering an ode to family (and the displacement of), a visceral response to the calamity of mental health.
From: "Of Genocide, or Merely Sound"
I belong to the silence of a pomegranate
just cut open, the red seeds
pebbling a white plate.
Point is, there are so many enjoyable themes in this collection. The lines are adroitly served so that you sense you are reading poetry from one who is a teacher and student of the craft. The language is profound. What I enjoyed most was the soft and supple feel of these words that made me carry them around, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Philadelphia Academy of Music. I couldn't spend the holidays with family this year, so I chose to spend it with art. And I didn't have my end-of-year-reading with D.H. Lawrence, like I normally do, but I enjoyed the time spent with Roger Reeves.
(Happy New Year fellow GoodReads friends. Best wishes to you and yours).
September 4, 2014
This is an amazing collection of poetry, Reeves's first. Full disclosure: I work with him in the English department at UIC in Chicago. When I finished his poetry reading "job talk" for the tough, really often unfriendly audience of our department, there were often nods, little hums--'mmm!"--of appreciation, some cries of affirmation, I walked out of the room and said to a colleague, "I think I am going to remember this reading for the rest of my life. That was just astonishing." And I meant by that, the poems of course, but also the performance of them, and I have heard dozens of the greats reading: Robert Bly, James Wright, Ginsberg, Oliver, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, so many others, and this was the level of ecstatic with the best of them. I don't really know Roger personally, no social connection, though we do nod in the hallway and have that first name basis. But I feel I know him and his sensibilities very well in this first book of poems that loves poetry so much, and draws on his love of poetry and his learning and imitating and drawing from the ideas and tricks and sensibilities of so many poets. He's African American and identifiably in that great tradition of American poetry, but his roots are really broader than that, such as in Neruda, and maybe especially Whitman, and so many contemporary poets I don't know that he references and dialogues within and through the images and ideas. Many of these poems are breathtaking, such as "Some Day, I'll Love Roger Reeves," and his spare, heartbreakingly sad poem about Emmit Till. Many are narrative and create recognizable landscapes, but others are challenging, formally complicated, subtle, rich in so many other ways. Poetry that is in love with poetry, form, language, all of it. Great stuff.
December 20, 2013
Matthew Dickman (Poetry Editor, Tin House Magazine): King Me by Roger Reeves. I have not read a first book of poems this year so exciting and ecstatic! Roger’s narratives flow with the life-blood of a Neruda energy, his images explode and reassemble in the heart of anyone reading these poems. This is an important book from a young poet who’s voice we hear traveling through the American landscape of race, gender, sorrow and joy. King me is a book that does what Anne Carson once wrote: he kinged my mind.
November 10, 2013
I pre-ordered this book last winter, excited to be able to support a dedicated artist and professor at UIC.
I just received this little book in the mail yesterday, and have devoured it. My lips dripp'd ink.
The poetry collected here resonates pieces of my soul that are just beginning to develop. His writing is sensuous and breathing.
The poetry here is greatly influenced by Walt Whitman, my favorite author, and Reeves takes from him his best qualities while retaining his own voice. His examination of the African American identity is jarring, poignant, and artfully wrought.
With my focus on American folk and blues hymns, work songs, and their relationship to the labor culture in this country, this will be a selection of poetry that I revisit over and over.
I just received this little book in the mail yesterday, and have devoured it. My lips dripp'd ink.
The poetry collected here resonates pieces of my soul that are just beginning to develop. His writing is sensuous and breathing.
The poetry here is greatly influenced by Walt Whitman, my favorite author, and Reeves takes from him his best qualities while retaining his own voice. His examination of the African American identity is jarring, poignant, and artfully wrought.
With my focus on American folk and blues hymns, work songs, and their relationship to the labor culture in this country, this will be a selection of poetry that I revisit over and over.
February 18, 2014
Most poetry collections are superb if one third of the poems make the hair on the back of one's neck stand up. Every poem in Roger Reeves' "King Me" is a taut and startling surprise and every poem ends with a last line that will stalk the reader's unconscious for a long time.
February 12, 2014
You can read my review here.
September 6, 2020
There is a constant rhythm to all of Reeves' poems, all intertwined with similar concepts and themes. This book most certainly has its stars ("Cross Country," "Do Not Enter," "Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves" are my personal favorites)
July 13, 2015
a 3.5, rounding up
rich language & a deft balance of the personal & the public. some of the repetitions worked for me, some didn't. others mileage may vary.
a solid & intriguing debut collection. will keep an eye out for future work from reeves.
rich language & a deft balance of the personal & the public. some of the repetitions worked for me, some didn't. others mileage may vary.
a solid & intriguing debut collection. will keep an eye out for future work from reeves.
May 23, 2025
wowww this book is beautiful. it's like spring mud, it's so sensory. thank you charlotte!
Read
March 17, 2024apocalyptic &smoked & i'm w/ dickman's Neruda note
June 12, 2016
I think this is only a kind of warning shot from Roger Reeves, and that his future books will be more important. That said, King Me is important. It should be read aloud, even when it makes you uncomfortable. That's important too.
June 17, 2019
Bees & tongues, bees & tongues...
17 June 2019 reread: Reeves manages the spectrum of ode and elegy better than almost anyone. One of the best collections of poems I've ever read. Secretly sort of messy?
17 June 2019 reread: Reeves manages the spectrum of ode and elegy better than almost anyone. One of the best collections of poems I've ever read. Secretly sort of messy?
February 8, 2015
Breathtaking...one of the books I will carry with me for years to come.
May 31, 2015
Wow wow wow--I have nothing to say, just read it.
March 22, 2015
KING ME was my favorite book of 2014. Reeves is a talent, and his book tackles difficult topics with sincerity and care.
March 11, 2016
took me a while but so so good.
June 1, 2018
Late to this, but a very impressive debut.
February 18, 2024
At the center of Reeves’s book is s a presence wrapped around the roles of witness and empathizer and representer. On one hand, there is the poet’s position in the world, what he thinks about injustice and nature and the ways nature can express its singular understanding of injustice. Poems in the first half, especially, remark on some historic injustice, or a moment of violence towards Black people, and then shifts to a scene where nature appears to configure that violence within itself. Then there is the poet’s presence within the scope of those injustices. Historic realities inform his present and how, then, does a poet occupy his present in light of these events. These things happened. And these things happened. And this is the present the poet has inherited, whether or not it’s the present the reader is a part of. It’s this balance where the poet is both informing the reader of these historic realities and witnessing to them for his reader. What is remarkable about the writing, though, is how it can have a distanced stance towards the subject and also an immersive stance. And while I would place this in Reeves’s style, the poems about his brother’s suicide in Houston, explicitly mentioned towards the end of the book, makes Reeves as both objective recorder and romantic expressivist concrete.
It’s hard to explain this quality to the poems, because the style is intricate and baroque in its description. And describing how that operates on the reading feels as important as describing the poetic subject. Or maybe it’s that the poetic subject establishes a context that Reeves will imagistically elaborate on. And sometimes the especially long threads of description carry their own substance. Or the subject is occluded by that substance. And that’s part of the pleasure in reading these. I would compare it to work by Carl Phillips, where Phillips might occupy the reader’s imagination with what is often an analogy about desire or shame. But with Phillips there is a syntactic momentum that signals a causal string of logic. Causal connections might be present for Reeves. But the elaborate imagery is more likely to be the poetic feature and pleasure more than the larger statement.
Like whatever the dynamic between the poet and his sister, who appears to be institutionalized for a mental condition. The poet often registers his inability to help her even as he sits on the same bench with her. Those poems register a personal struggle that has no real outlet. They prepare the reader for what will eventually be the elegiac mourning for the brother. And I can’t help but read the Black experience into both brother’s and sister’s lives, with Reeves reflecting their lives back on his own, and how it brings a bewildered sense of history or country or personhood.
It’s hard to explain this quality to the poems, because the style is intricate and baroque in its description. And describing how that operates on the reading feels as important as describing the poetic subject. Or maybe it’s that the poetic subject establishes a context that Reeves will imagistically elaborate on. And sometimes the especially long threads of description carry their own substance. Or the subject is occluded by that substance. And that’s part of the pleasure in reading these. I would compare it to work by Carl Phillips, where Phillips might occupy the reader’s imagination with what is often an analogy about desire or shame. But with Phillips there is a syntactic momentum that signals a causal string of logic. Causal connections might be present for Reeves. But the elaborate imagery is more likely to be the poetic feature and pleasure more than the larger statement.
Like whatever the dynamic between the poet and his sister, who appears to be institutionalized for a mental condition. The poet often registers his inability to help her even as he sits on the same bench with her. Those poems register a personal struggle that has no real outlet. They prepare the reader for what will eventually be the elegiac mourning for the brother. And I can’t help but read the Black experience into both brother’s and sister’s lives, with Reeves reflecting their lives back on his own, and how it brings a bewildered sense of history or country or personhood.
February 16, 2025
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.
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.
November 17, 2017
Roger Reeves is a remarkable poet who creates poems of beautiful language and metaphors. In this collection, he wrote from creative predicaments and as important historical characters. I found his footnotes on poem titles to be done particuarly well--they illuminate information about some aspect of the poem without revealing too much about the author's intent or sidetrack the reader. I especially enjoyed his poems about parasites. My one star short of 5 comes from the wandering nature of his poems, although delightful at first, I found that I got lost in his intent or the intent of the poem. I am sure reading this for a class or with a group would elucidate some of that for me. Overall, a great short poetry collection from a black man!
June 25, 2018
This is a very good book. Roger Reeves makes it clear through his writing that he is both an amazing poet and a true academic. Lines like “Often, I carry the stars of madness home with a pinch of honey” and “Oh, all of this flight and not one body sad or broken like a bird’s blue egg in the tines of a rhododendron bush" are just some of his outstanding images present in this book. "Some Young Kings" and "Brazil" are the poems that sang to my soul. Academically, he weaves in Old Masters from W. H. Auden’s “Musée de Beaux Arts” in “Boy Removing Fleas” and expertly pairs two of William Carlos Williams's most famous poems in "I've Given." This is a fantastic debut collection of poems.
October 11, 2023
In his debut collection King Me, Roger Reeves explores a vast landscape of political issues. His influences are multifaceted, drawing on Biblical allusions, pastoral imagery, American history, and Black cultural icons. Reeves is an ecstatic poet, with many poems firmly grounded in the body; at the same time, his incisive analysis allows the poems to transcend as well. King Me offers a politicized yet laudatory vision of Black art in America.
November 21, 2017
Enjoyable, visceral poems. If you have the chance to hear Roger read in person make it happen!
Some of my fave poems include: Brazil, Self-Portrait as Ernestine "Tiny" Davis, Cross Country, Pledge
Some of my fave poems include: Brazil, Self-Portrait as Ernestine "Tiny" Davis, Cross Country, Pledge
August 9, 2017
Roger Reeves is one of the best poetpersons living right now, hands down. I feel so privileged to have met him & worked with him.
October 15, 2020
Exceptional. Had to read in bits. Difficult. Beautiful. Harsh He is a brilliant, masterful poet who embraces tough subjects straight on.
October 24, 2020
The good stuff.
April 21, 2023
:((( jesus
June 16, 2024
Straight bars
April 13, 2025
I mean dang these are good poems
November 24, 2019
crap i forgot to review this
great poems, great technique, i barely remember anything because i was too sleep-deprived though
great poems, great technique, i barely remember anything because i was too sleep-deprived though
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews