Description

W. W.Norton, hardcover

Publication Date: March 22, 2022

Publisher Marketing:An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster.

In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Awardwinning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanityclimate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss. The poems inBest Barbarianroam across the literary and social landscape, fromBeowulfs Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Drawing on a history of poetry that ranges from the Aeneid to Walt Whitman to Drake,Best Barbarianoffers moments of joy and intimacy amid catastrophe.