King Me by Roger Reeves (review)

I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.

frederick douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Two legs took my four.And I, freed of my horse-selfWho lay dead to the world,ran through the clover.

vievee francis

Roger Reeves’s debut collection, King Me, is an urgent, difficult book, one that invites us to participate in its speakers’ worlds to the extent that we are willing to give up whatever we brought with us to the gates. In no uncertain terms, these are poems meant to unmoor. It is, in many ways, Reeves’s steadfast commitment to defamiliarizing his readers’ most stable categories that drives King Me, this sense that even when one encounters famous characters in the text—and there are no shortage of celebrity cameos here: Ernestine “Tiny” Davis, various members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and Walt Whitman all make appearances—we are somehow also meeting them for the first time, discovering their voices anew against a backdrop for which we have yet to engineer a language.

One gets the feeling by book’s end that this ongoing exchange between the illegible and the ineffable (which we might also think of as the distance between the moment of reading and the possibility of reconciling such fugitive music to something like narrative) is exactly what Reeves was going for, that the cohabitation and collaboration of otherworldly violence and undeniable beauty is not only a guiding logic of the book itself, but also the material worlds that these poems gesture toward. Reeves writes dispossession like few others, and it is his simultaneous engagement with national history, the sociopolitical landscape of the contemporary moment, and the interior lives of those cast aside by the interlocking systems of domination that have so thoroughly shaped both, that is perhaps, the text’s most striking feature upon first read. One of the collection’s finest poems, “The Mare of Money,” displays such intertextuality in grand fashion:

This horse must lie, eyes open,amongst the stones and fresh watercrawfish in Money, Mississippilisten to the men’s boots break the wateras they drop a black boy’s body near her head,pick him up, only to let him fall againthere: bent and eye-to-eye with heras though decaying is somethingthat requires a witness

Though a version of the poem was first published by Poetry Magazine back in 2008, its relevance to our current moment—one in which, according to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person in the United States is killed by vigilante, security Éguard, or police officers roughly every twenty-eight hours—is immediately evident. Echoing also the more recent deaths of Oscar Grant, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and still too many others, Reeves returns us here to the murder scene of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till from a yet-untapped perspective within the lineage of poetry dedicated to his memory: that of a dead horse looking on from a short distance, the very same “mare of money” for which the poem is titled. Throughout the poem, the reader is forced to engage over and over with questions of proxy and proximity, with what kind of gratuitous, unspeakable violence could produce this moment in the first place, could make it so that the only witness to Till’s murder is one that cannot give an account at all.

King Me is full of such sharp, unsettling slippages. Rather than shy away from historically fraught sites of exchange, Reeves instead gives us a book that dares to dwell within the messy, murky space between human and animal, free and unfree, living and dead. What emerges from this commitment to the hard labor of empathy and risk is a collection that soars. Reeves is a poet who is willing to take his readers deep into moments that defy representation...