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Is There a Right Way to Talk About Black Culture?

In the essay collection “Dark Days,” Roger Reeves tries to sidestep mainstream arguments to engage deeply with the way people actually live and think.

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By Ismail Muhammad

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DARK DAYS: Fugitive Essays, by Roger Reeves

Consider the Black Square. In the summer of 2020, not long after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and a few months into pandemic lockdown, people who felt galvanized to act took to Instagram or Facebook, replacing their profile pictures with a plain black box to signal their support for Black victims of racism. The Square epitomized that moment’s sometimes-futile rhetoric around race and Blackness. Its content-less status — political speech as the absence of any actual speech — drove home how hemmed in we were by platforms that commodified our expressions into repetitive, thoughtless forms. We swapped out ideas and conversation for memes that illuminated nothing. Everybody was talking; few of us were saying anything.

In his latest book, the essay collection “Dark Days,” the poet Roger Reeves seeks shelter from the demand for public utterance. “We live in a loquacious age, one in which silence gets mischaracterized as passive, as noninvolvement, as capitulating to subjection,” he ruminates. “Everyone’s in their feelings and talking about it.” In a world where the links between politics, speech and art are overdetermined, Reeves is searching for an intellectual practice that resists the pressure to oversimplify.

He finds his way by retracing the footsteps of critics like Saidiya Hartman and the late Greg Tate, turning to the ample resources of Black vernacular culture to theorize a way of thinking that values otherwise marginalized, criminalized and pathologized communities. “I stare, I read, I critique and think from these zones of nowhere,” he announces. These “fugitive essays” ask what becomes possible when we embrace the obscurity of Black cultural practices that live and die with their practitioners; perhaps as a result, Reeves doesn’t shy from obscurity himself when it’s called for. To the contrary, he insists on the recondite and abstract as bulwarks against the nation’s ravenous appetite for Black life.

Reeves rejects fundamentally unjust political institutions in favor of small-scale practices that cultivate community in the absence of power. He proposes neither seizing the reins of oppressive systems nor reconciling ourselves to them. Rather, he calls for art that locates liberation in quotidian moments. Spaces like the barbershop, the nightclub, the church and the “hush harbor” — secretive antebellum religious meetings that offered respite from slavery — become sites where we can hone our imaginations and carve out freedom amid oppression.

This is all inextricable from reading and writing. At its best “Dark Days” is the record of an intellectual life sustained by the Black vernacular. In the essay “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars,” Reeves recounts learning how to be a critic in the Pentecostal church. He remembers time spent cloistered in “living rooms and storefront churches in strip malls behind Red Lobsters and Jamesways and Kmarts,” where, holding a Bible on his lap, he found his vocation. At Bible study he was “allowed to raise a young hand and contribute with a comment or question if so moved,” establishing a democratic habit of reading and discussion. He first encounters the politics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. not in a school but in his grandmother’s living room, where his mother played records of their speeches every winter. (Here I can’t help smiling, remembering how my mother did the same for me.)

In two poetry collections, Reeves’s M.O. has been to locate unexpected juxtapositions and proximities in the historical archive, inviting readers to speculate about what intellectual possibilities they might offer. His 2022 collection, the cheekily titled “ Best Barbarian ,” includes a poem whose speaker (Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father) wanders a poetic purgatory full of literary luminaries; at one point Ezra Pound (a fascist partisan of Mussolini and Hitler) offers his services as a guide, hoping to be the Virgil to the speaker’s Dante.

Those moments are instructive examples of how to be a barbarian in the house of Western culture, and the essays in “Dark Days” flaunt an equally voracious curiosity. “Profligacy” is the key word here: With a nod to Hartman’s explorations of “wayward” lives and the presumed promiscuity of Black urban culture, Reeves reframes promiscuity as an aesthetic and intellectual virtue. He wantonly draws connections between seemingly disparate texts and cultures, and is as likely to discuss a YouTube clip of the late actor Michael K. Williams dancing or reflect on barbershop slick-talk as he is to analyze the poet Solmaz Sharif’s experimental verse.

In Reeves’s hands profligacy becomes an ethical necessity: Everything must be thought of in relation to what it shares space with. Reeves casts about for practices that build intimacy in the face of difference, that respect what we cannot know about others, and he sits in the difficulty of that unknowing. Recounting a trip to speak with students at a Native school, he feels his status as a stranger among strangers. His discomfort becomes an opportunity rather than an obstacle. “I was willing to stand in that awkward and discomfiting silence,” he avows, “because I hoped that we might converse about the silence, the chasm between us, our people.”

Reeves explicitly rejects the notion that he’s seeking a facile, romantic solidarity. “This history of coming together with Native folks is complicated,” he acknowledges, “by Native folks owning and participating in the slave trade, Native folks buying into and proliferating racism and anti-Blackness.”

Often, though, his gleefully erudite rhetoric operates with the imprecision of simile, downplaying difference in favor of a solidarity that one senses Reeves wants very badly to exist in this world. His language sometimes papers over divergent interests and contexts in a way that disappoints. There’s a maddening vagueness at the level of grammar and syntax that too often masks a lack of argumentative specificity.

Reeves’s favorite phrases are comparative. Everything is “similar to” or “reminiscent of” something else. The abandoned Native lodge that the character Sixo stumbles on in “Beloved” becomes “a sort of commons” and later “a type of archive.” At one point T.S. Eliot becomes not just an interlocutor for queer and Black studies theorists like José Esteban Muñoz and Fred Moten, but their kin, a poet with an “ontologically Black and queer” conception of history.

In moments like those the ease that Reeves claims to shun shows its seductive face. I could not shake the feeling that Reeves was not simply casting his eye upon the literary field and inviting me to look along with him, but instead coercing me into seeing things his way.

“Dark Days” stumbles on that undertone of coercion, as Reeves repeatedly tries to map art and politics into a much-too-easy relation. In reading fiction, he argues, “We make, map and begin to inhabit a politics, an otherwise that can be exported out of the text and into the world we occupy.” We end, it seems, back in the cul-de-sac of overdetermination from which Reeves tried to take his leave.

Ismail Muhammad is a story editor at The Times Magazine.

DARK DAYS: Fugitive Essays | By Roger Reeves | 223 pp. | Graywolf Press | $26

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• “Stunning. . . . In a variety of pieces exploring race and legacy and community, Reeves captures the sorrows inherent in the way we live today even while keeping a keen eye toward opportunity for joy.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture

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• “Reeves rejects fundamentally unjust political institutions in favor of small-scale practices that cultivate community in the absence of power. . . . He calls for art that locates liberation in quotidian moments. Spaces like the barbershop, the nightclub, the church and the ‘hush harbor’—secretive antebellum religious meetings that offered respite from slavery—become sites where we can hone our imaginations and carve out freedom amid oppression.” —Ismail Muhammad, The New York Times Book Review
• “Reeves’s trademark lyricism shines throughout, proving that he’s just as affecting in prose as in verse. This impresses.” —Publishers Weekly

“With this text, [Reeves] inclines toward his ideal of the ecstatic, defiantly daring to build the sort of life—intellectual and free—so easily denied to Black Americans. A cerebral, ruminative essay collection brimming with insight and vision.” — Kirkus Reviews

• “This is a gift of a book written by a poet with searing intelligence. . . .  Dark Days  builds with essays that are astonishing in their revelations as well as their forms. . . . Reeves contemplates the silence, the introspection necessary for eloquent responses to our increasingly frightening world.” —Denise Duhamel, Best American Poetry blog

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Dark Days: Fugitive Essays Kindle Edition

* WINNER OF THE 2024 GLCA NEW WRITERS AWARD FOR CREATIVE NONFICTION * A crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in—especially in—these dark days In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down. Together, these groundbreaking essays build a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground. “The peace we fight and search for,” Reeves writes, “begins and ends with being still.”

• Print length 291 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Graywolf Press
• Publication date August 1, 2023
• File size 7324 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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About the author.

“Stunning. . . . In a variety of pieces exploring race and legacy and community, Reeves captures the sorrows inherent in the way we live today even while keeping a keen eye toward opportunity for joy.” ―Maris Kreizman, Vulture “With this text, [Reeves] inclines toward his ideal of the ecstatic, defiantly daring to build the sort of life―intellectual and free―so easily denied to Black Americans. A cerebral, ruminative essay collection brimming with insight and vision.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Reeves’s trademark lyricism shines throughout, proving that he’s just as affecting in prose as in verse. This impresses.” ― Publishers Weekly “This is a gift of a book written by a poet with searing intelligence. . . . Dark Days builds with essays that are astonishing in their revelations as well as their forms. . . . Reeves contemplates the silence, the introspection necessary for eloquent responses to our increasingly frightening world.” ―Denise Duhamel, Best American Poetry blog “Reeves extends passion and profound vulnerability surrounding his experiences as a Black man and father. . . . These essays also ask readers to question how peace is experienced: is peace only obtainable on a massive scale, or can it be discovered in the pleasure of reading, in joyful songs of praise, or even in absolute silence?” ―Library Journal “Reeves uses a personal lens to access the overwhelming expansiveness of history. [His] prose is lyrical, poetic, and engrossing, and sure to appeal to fans of Hanif Abdurraqib and Michael Eric Dyson.” ― Booklist “ Dark Days is a testament to Roger Reeves’s dazzling intellect and passion. His essays are soaring reflections on joy, ecstasy, and stillness as profound practices that fuel Black freedom and resistance. He loads every rift of his subjects with ore, as he pays generous attention to artists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to OutKast to Michael K. Williams. Reeves’s declamations are riven with insights that have truly changed my way of thinking.” ―Cathy Park Hong “Pro tip: partake of the brilliance of Roger Reeves. Among other marvels, the essays in Dark Days challenge silences and attempted erasures with acuity, with eloquence, with a thunderous beating heart.” ―Mitchell S. Jackson “In this heady collection, Roger Reeves troubles history, steps out on faith, dances with the dead, locates his grandmother in a footnote, and finds a way to answer his daughter when she asks if the sirens are coming to kill her. All along, Reeves is close-reading poetry, music, fiction, and film and showing us what it means to be underground, to be ‘in and out of time.’” ―Eula Biss

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0C3YQZJ5Q
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Graywolf Press (August 1, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 1, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 7324 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 291 pages
• #1,703 in Essays (Kindle Store)
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Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

A crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in―especially in―these dark days.

In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor―places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.

Together, these groundbreaking essays build a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground. “The peace we fight and search for,” Reeves writes, “begins and ends with being still.”

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Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2023);  Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton, 2022); and  King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award.

Reeves is also the recipient of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, a Whiting Award, and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Princeton University.

An associate professor of poetry in the English department at the University of Texas, Austin, Reeves was the February 2020 Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day . 

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We Can’t Delay Our Joy: An Interview with Roger Reeves About His New Book, “Dark Days: Fugitive Essays”

by Mary Wisniewski | July 31, 2023

• Author Profiles

Roger Reeves/Photo: Ana Schwartz

Poet Roger Reeves has a shelf full of honors—the Whiting Award, the Pushcart Prize, and most recently, the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. But his new book, “Dark Days,” is not poetry, but essays. In rich and heady prose, Reeves mixes memoir, theory and literary criticism. His subjects range from an opera singer breaking a silence curfew by singing in the streets to the “hush harbors,” where enslaved people would steal away to pray. He takes on both “Hamilton” and the “1619 Project,” and writes letters to Michael Brown, the young Black man killed by police.

Reeves, a former University of Illinois at Chicago professor now at University of Texas-Austin, talks about why he wanted to write essays, and how the loquaciousness of our social-media-saturated society may be hurting the quest for freedom.

Why did you write this book now?

I wanted to have multiple types of conversations in multiple places. I know that nonfiction prose goes in different places than poetry does. Two, as writers we must often stretch ourselves, and I think it’s good to stretch out of the genre you’re known for… I really wanted to find a place where we can bring back a certain type of public intellectualism. And I think essays are a great place for that. Also, I want to make criticism sexy again. There was a time when we really embraced critics in America… We’ve given over public intellectual and critical work that’s grappling with ideas either purely to academia, or, if it’s political, it’s purely happening in the news cycle. I’m really a fan of James Baldwin and Lionel Trilling and Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison and cats like that, and Susan Sontag… Remember when there were debates on television between Baldwin and William F. Buckley? I want to bring back the idea that what we need to do is be listening to ideas and thinking about ideas, and they should be in the popular discourse, the popular imagination.

Why did you call it “Dark Days?” There’s a lot of singing and joy and light in these essays.

Remember a poet loves irony. There’s irony to it. It’s also a callback. Baldwin had an essay called “Dark Days.” The book was forming, taking shape during the pandemic, which were dark days, as well as during the protests occurring in 2020… Sometimes in our darkest moments is the time to express joy, when it feels as if catastrophe is at the door, that maybe some of our way out of catastrophe is thinking about pleasure, thinking about the joys that we can bring about in the middle of disaster… We forget that during the Civil Rights movement, which was a pretty dark time, the nights before the rallies, they would often meet at churches or in the field and they would sing, and prepare their bodies and their minds for the dogs and the water hoses that were coming the next day. I keep thinking about how in these dark days, we will need this joy. We can’t delay our joy until this is over.

Much of your book is about paying attention and listening. Why is this message so urgent?

It’s so urgent partly because our loquaciousness, everybody talking, is a type of labor that we think is going to yield our freedom, but is actually yielding the opposite. I don’t think anybody is unclear that the police occupying Black neighborhoods, killing Black people, putting their knees on their necks—no one is unclear that that’s terrible! I don’t think I need to say that (laughs). I don’t think saying that moves the needle, politically… As someone who’s fighting the anti-truth laws here in Texas [limits on discussion of racial history], who went and testified in front of Senate committees about how unnecessary these laws are and yet they passed, that tells me my speaking is not the thing that’s going to liberate me… I don’t think they care—I mean Republican senators, elected officials. I think we have to turn toward each other. It doesn’t mean we let them off the hook, but I do think there’s a different kind of conversation, where we have to listen to each other. We think of social media as a kind of liberation because you get to represent yourself and be your own brand. But I think brand is exactly the issue, we become little capitalists and then re-enshrine the thing that’s actually hurting us.

What do you mean by “ecstatic” poetry?

What I mean is a poem that revels in the body, that thinks about the body as producing a knowledge that will eventually have language but maybe doesn’t begin in language. It moves in pleasure, it moves out of joy, it’s a poetry that is willing to encounter the difficult and understands that to be a place to be from. There’s something to being able to be confused, to be in the unknown and still revel in that.

How is essay-writing different?

The query in the poem, the not-knowing and the following in the not-knowing, is part of the delight of a poem, it’s part of the freedom. In an essay, it’s harder to stay only in the search. We often want essays to have some kind of argument… It’s much more of a guided tour. I think that people will step into an essay quicker than they’ll step into a poem. They feel they know it better. I wanted to write into a form that people didn’t feel as intimidated by.

Since you first wrote to Michael Brown in 2015, has anything changed in the Black experience?

I think we’re in the same troubled area… We think of the Civil Rights movement as happening in amber, from 1954 to 1968. and it’s just not true. We think of history as a line that moves from one point to another, but what if history is more cyclical, or more like a spiral, or a sine wave? I just find that we’re still in the midst of all the same things we were in the midst of in 2014 and 2020 and in 1968…

How do you help students overcoming their fear of writing?

I tell them it’s okay to fuck up, it’s okay to make a mistake. You first have to allow yourself out of whatever you think is good writing. Because often what is keeping someone from writing is they have an idea of what they want a thing to be. I often think the essay and the poem are smarter than us. The language is older than us, the language is much wiser than me. By putting certain words together, the language is going to push in a direction where you say, oh, this is strange, and you’re just going to embrace that strangeness and let go of what one imagines the end product is going to be…. Often, the editor helps. It helps to have somebody ask, “What do you really mean here?” Then you begin to drill down a bit more. I often in poems don’t know what’s next after a line, but I do trust the poem, I trust the line. I trust the language, and try to let the language attend to it.

“Dark Days: Fugitive Essays” By Roger Reeves Graywolf Press, 232 pages

Mary Wisniewski is a Chicago writer and author of “Algren: A Life.”

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Roger Reeves on Sensory Essays

In conversation with mitzi rapkin on the first draft podcast.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Roger Reeves about his new essay collection,  Dark Days .

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: One of the things that I sensed from your essays when I put it down and walked away, I was like, that was a very sensory filled experience. I feel like your essays are very sensory. And even though you’re talking about joy and ecstasy, and the terrible history of what America is, and the violence and the hate and also the beauty of poetry and the influence of art and the freedom of art.  I walked away with a few key words, which were like, ecstasy, freedom, silence, reading. And they felt more bodily to me.

Roger Reeves: It’s funny, because, you know, first we talked about the intellectual complexity of the essays, right?  I think that’s what I’m trying to do with the sentence, I want to make the sentence be a feeling because one of the things we carry with us well is feeling. And what I mean by well is we know our feelings, we can be with our feelings, we’re all kind of experts of our own feelings, hopefully.  And so, I want it to feel corporeal. I want the essays to feel as if they are embodying pleasure, that they are playing.  I have an eight-year-old, I watch her play. And I watch kids play, and I think that’s the way to make art, which is even when we’re doing something with words is to make it feel as if it’s as tangible as an orange or tomato, or you know, petting a horse or touching a tree. I want to bring in those sensory moments. And I think even in one of the letters in the essay collection, where I imagined Michael Brown sitting next to a cousin, I want people to be thinking about people’s bodies in space. That often there’s a knowledge in the space with others.  I always think about how I physically feel when I’m reading. Like I ask myself, Oh, what do you feel, what are you noticing? Because the book is creating an experience for me to sort of be in the world with it even as I’m in the world with the book. But I’m also thinking about the sentence, quite honestly, like, I want to make a sentence that makes people feel. I want people to feel as if, even if they didn’t understand the sentence, they understand it, maybe physically corporeally, right, that the sentence is physically enacting something on them. And that comes from the poem. So hopefully, I was building sentences and building essays where people felt like they could just be present with the work.

Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of  Dark Days: Fugitive Essays Best Barbarian ; and  King Me, winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award.

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The Hush Harbor

Roger Reeves’s book of essays, Dark Days , is a rigorous work.

Reeves highlights this in the collection’s second essay, “Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind,” which recalls a 2019 trip to give a reading at the McLeod Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. Such a setting is fraught no matter how you look at it, and especially for Reeves, a Black poet and critic who was raised in New Jersey (he now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin) but has familial roots in the region. At the ginhouse, he notices a “small detail among the brick and chicken wire and darkness. A child’s fingerprint. A child’s fingerprint in the brick.” He begins to tell himself a story. Then, he stops.

During slavery, Reeves understands, young children “were put to work turning over hot bricks to dry after they had come out of the kiln.” Whatever else it may be, then, the fingerprint is evidence. And yet, what to do in the face of that? How should he respond? A part of him wants to trace the print with his own finger, but he resists. Instead, he considers “the limits of empathy, catharsis, historical reckoning, and the ease by which we think we salve the open wounds of history and the ongoing catastrophe of racism and discrimination in America with personal epiphany and gesture, with tears and the gnashing of teeth.”

This is an essential concept, and it resonates throughout Dark Days . How do we begin to live outside narrative? “Everyone,” Reeves elaborates, “wants a narrative—beginning, middle, and triumphant end. Some happy future that derives from this ignominious present. But what if history is a lyric? What if the freedom you seek can’t be narrated…?” The questions recall the work of Claudia Rankine, who in Citizen also aspires to address race and heritage through the lens of the lyric. “Beyond the narrative, beyond the storytelling, beyond the anecdotes,” she told me during a 2016 interview , “is another world of feeling so buried and dark and crippling that it needs its own genre.”

Reeves is after something similar: to make a book that toggles between memory and forgetting, that recognizes the utility of thinking about how the past informs the future (and vice versa) but also its futility. “There is no definitive narrative to escaping, to freedom,” he insists. “It is—only is.” The statement couldn’t be more apt. What have we learned, after all, from living in this moment? COVID, the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter, the coup attempt of January 6—if there is any lesson, it has to do with how the narrative can be turned. Think of that plantation again, where descendants of enslaved people continued to live and work until the 1990s, sharecropping as its own form of indentured servitude.

“When did we, our nation, slip into a post-fact epoch?” Reeves wonders in “Poetry Isn’t Revolution but a Way of Knowing Why It Must Come.” (The title is drawn from Adrienne Rich’s poem “ Dreamwood .”) At first, he dates this to the second Iraq war, but that’s a post-fact in its own right, a bit of cultural amnesia reframed as rhetorical strategy. There is no post-fact epoch, since such an ethos is embedded in our history. “Maybe the United States,” Reeves concludes, “has always been post-fact: beginning with the constitutional fraudulence of slavery.”

Here we glimpse the author’s method: not to ask questions so much as to subvert them, and in so doing to turn to silence, which is where the real work begins. He remembers his grandmother, who worked as a domestic; among her clients “were some of the first Black women to earn PhDs.” It was in these homes that Reeves was exposed to Black intellectual life, but the anecdote is not the point. Instead, as with that fingerprint in the brick, he wants to discover where it leads, not to look back on how it was. His essays are personal but never merely (or even mostly) autobiographical.

“To survive,” he reflects, “requires a lyric, ironic, improvisational sensibility.”

The most subversive material in Dark Days involves intimacy, which has long been what oppressors fear the most. Intimacy, after all, is where we find the space to create resistance, learn to protect ourselves. In “Peace Be Still,” the book’s long central essay, Reeves writes about “the hush harbor,” a zone of “quiet in the maelstrom of plantation life.” Redoubts like this were what might now be called (in a very different context) temporary autonomous zones, “clandestine and invisible meetings” entered into at great risk. “I have been searching for where I might go, how I might bring myself some measure of peace, some quiet in the middle of what feels like catastrophe,” Reeves acknowledges.

And later: “I began to think of the hush harbor as a space of revelation, a space of study.”

I want to say that Dark Days seems to me a hush harbor also, a place for Reeves (and us with him) not to find solutions so much as to articulate the questions, to see the situation plain. No false narratives, no empty declarations. No easy answers, or answers at all. Hence, his use of the word fugitive , since he’s operating along the edges of the discourse. Hence, his use of trembling , which represents, by turns, anticipation and fear. Trembling is a word I associate with James Baldwin; it is the last one in “Sonny’s Blues”—“the very cup of trembling”—which Reeves recalls his mother reading aloud to him on the day Baldwin died.

Or does he? Once more, Reeves leaves us to confront the insufficiency of narrative. “This might be less history and more the fiction of memory,” he confides. Still, I can’t stop thinking about the hush harbor. Reeves is open about his debt to Baldwin, even when he dissents. Late in Dark Days , he takes him to task for writing, in The Fire Next Time , that “great men have done great things here…and we can make America what America must become.” Baldwin’s declaration is, for Reeves, the epitome of the sentimental. I don’t necessarily disagree. I want, however, to imagine trembling echoing in the silence, in the space offered by Dark Days .

“This,” Reeves asserts, “is why reading is dangerous—because it points.… Or at least the reading I’m interested in doing, the reading that begins on the edges of plantations, in small groups of study, away from the eyes, appetites, laws and codes of the masters and their policing paterollers;…reading that disobeys, critiques the present through pointing, pointing away to the swamps and marshes where we might convene something like freedom.”•

Graywolf Press DARK DAYS , BY ROGER REEVES

David L Ulin is Alta Journal ’s books editor.

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Science Fiction Double Feature

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

Roger reeves. graywolf, $26 (240p) isbn 978-1-64445-241-7.

Reviewed on: 05/23/2023

Genre: Nonfiction

Paperback - 240 pages - 978-1-64445-306-3

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Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and Best Barbarian , winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His essays have appeared in Granta , the Yale Review , and elsewhere. Reeves’s Dark Days: Fugitive Essays is a crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in—especially in—these dark days. Vulture recently called it “stunning” and applauded how it “captures the sorrows inherent in the way we live today even while keeping a keen eye toward opportunity for joy.” He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Books by roger reeves, you might enjoy, fady joudah wins $100,000 jackson poetry prize.

“Distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”

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Rat Among the Pines

Terror, tonight

Is the moon Slipping from a rat’s gray grasp,

Finding its way back Into the sky, which is America—

A white moon Leaning on the night’s neck

With its hands in its pocket, Moon hung calm above

Catastrophe, the police Breaking the neck of a man

Who had just brushed summer’s First bead of rain from his eye-

Lashes. Who—knocking a Newport Against a wrist, watching smoke

Break its head against a brick Wall—is preparing to die

Unaware they are preparing to die. Heavy the moon, silly the tasking

Of a rat with delaying death. Terror, tonight

Is the candor of the earth Where someone is preparing to die

And the earth receives that dying With its hands in its pockets.

And the moon that once burnt the silk Hump of a rat, back in the sky.

And my daughter hiding in the rose Bushes, asking who, who the sirens

Have come to kill. And someone calling It beautiful—summer, moon—

And someone dying beneath that beauty, Which is America.

Rachel Cusk

Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, after death, the dancing drum, the uses of memory, new perspectives, enduring writing..

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Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten says, fugitivity is “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. . . . a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument,” how does writing fugitively effect a writer’s orientation to self and selfhood, to one’s own community and people, to nation and nationhood, to the canon and canon formation, to otherness and the stranger, to life and living in the ever-unfolding apocalypse? We look together at what a poet writing essays tells us both about the essay form and about Roger’s poetry and poetics. Deep dives into questions of time, progress, repetition, metaphor, history, ancestry, futurity, presence, sound, and silence.

For the bonus audio archive, Roger contributes an extended reading from Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa. This joins an ever-growing archive of supplemental audio from everyone from Natalie Diaz to Dionne Brand, Isabella Hammad to Christina Sharpe. You can find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page .

The Bookshop for today’s episode contains many of the books mentioned, referenced, or read from.

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Search form, roger reeves and martha s. jones for dark days **in-person**.

Loyalty is so excited to welcome Roger Reeves and Martha S. Jones for an IN-PERSON event celebrating the release of his debut nonfiction,  Dark Days ! Join us at Loyalty's Petworth store at 7 PM ET on Wednesday, August 16th for a wonderful discussion, followed by a meet + greet & book signing! This event is free to attend but RSVPs are required—please use the form below.  **Face masks are required for all attendees in the event space.**  Please email [email protected] with any questions.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in—especially in—these dark days In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s  Beloved  to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Reeves  is the author of the poetry collections King Me and Best Barbarian. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2015 Whiting Award, and Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University. His essays and poems have appeared in Poetry, the New Yorker, Granta, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

ABOUT THE IN CONVERSATION PARTNER

Martha S. Jones  is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. She is a Professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of  Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All  (2020),  Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America  (2018), and  All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900  (2007). You can check out some of Martha's recent writing on Vanguard in TIME and New York Times. She was featured in the new PBS documentary American Experience: The Vote. 

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during virtual or in-person events.

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Hardcover)

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Rsvp for roger reeves and martha s. jones for dark days 8/16/23.

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Roger Reeves: Running Through a City That is Running Out of Water

“All you have to do is be paying attention to a Black life to know what’s about to occur," Reeves says. "Black folks have always been running; running, just trying to be beautiful.”

The poetry of Roger Reeves takes us through centuries and civilizations and torn-open tomes in a single breath. He inhales Emmett Till and exhales Anne Frank. Then fills back up on winter, fire, Mussolini, Mississippi, genocide, John Henryism, and James of Scotland. Still, Reeves writes, “the lungs are a temporary house.”

Reeves’s debut collection “King Me” (Copper Canyon Press) came out in 2013; he is steadily working on his next book. When a writer compresses the whole world into a single poem, that poem takes time.

“Generally I take two or three years, sometimes even seven years,” Reeves says. “I want to make sure the poems are good — not just good for me or good for now.”

His poem “Some Young Kings,” spans boxing greats Mike Tyson and Jack Johnson, to the music of Charlie Parker, to the television drama Oz , and finally to Reeves himself.

“It’s hard to smile with an ear in your mouth,” he says of Tyson, “two names, and a daughter hanging by a thread from the railing of a treadmill.”

In 2009, Tyson’s 4-year-old daughter accidentally hanged herself in the family’s Arizona home.

Reeves and I talk at length about the complicated figure that is Mike Tyson: the boxing legend, the pigeon keeper, the prison stint, the ear. (He bit both of Holyfield’s ears during that fight.)

“I want to think about a person in his fullness rather than the very flat view we have of Black men,” says Reeves. “Tyson has a very caring side, but we think of him always as the pugilist and fighter. You see his tenderness in his older age, even though he’s been cruel. I identify with that.”

“Some Young Kings” connects to the Basquiat painting on the book’s cover, a poem in its own right. “Charles the First” (1982), is an angry graffiti scrawl of semiotics, coronating all kings and chiefs and comic book heroes with a brittle crown. Words speak louder than actions in Basquiat’s painting, with the stark phrase “Most Young Kings Get Thier Head Cut Off” etched at the bottom like a signature.

Reeves tells me he has recently revisited James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” regarding a project with American Short Fiction , about the eight books which have most influenced him as a writer. “The Fire Next Time” is comprised of two essays: “Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind” and “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

“Everyone talks about ‘Letter to My Nephew’ but I really love ‘Letter From a Region in My Mind.’ It’s a beautiful personal essay that looks at how religions functions for Black people, from Christianity to the Nation of Islam. It’s about how we find our beauty, once all these things — racism, all the isms — are done away with.”

“Letter to My Nephew” is the more well known of the two essays in Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” partly because it’s 20-something pages as opposed to 20,000 words. But very notably, Reeves points out, the essay is a manual on how to love yourself in spite of racism, in the face of catastrophe.

“We don’t address the child in each other, and I think that’s what Baldwin’s letter is about, the children being hurt. What’s happening right now in our country is the continuation of the Civil Rights Movement. And in all of this, what future are we making for the Black child?”

Reeves’s poem “For Black Children at the End of the World — and the Beginning,” written in the wake of George Floyd’s death, speaks to that child:

You are in the black car burning beneath the highway And rising above it — not as smoke But what causes it to rise. Hey, Black Child, You are the fire at the end of your elders’ Weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof, Stick, stone, several plagues including time.

Reeves was born in 1980 in New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. He grew up playing the trumpet and piano, and reading all kinds of stuff. He tells me he will read everything a writer has written if he likes one book in particular, a way to understand how the writer got there, especially when catching them mid-leap in their career. He learned to do this from his friend Jericho Brown, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry this year for his collection “The Tradition.”

Brown also encouraged Reeves to do this same thing with writers he struggles with. “It’s hard not to like somebody if you’re reading them carefully,” he tells me.

Which leads us to the poet John Ashbery. Reeves wasn’t particularly fond of his writing when he was younger, though that’s changed over time. By sitting with his work, staying close to it, he discovered what it offered: Ashbery, is an old-school formalist at heart. He engages in syntactical playfulness and shifting of registers, not unlike Nikki Giovanni or Amiri Baraka.

“Ashbery is simple in that he uses one poetic technique and will mine that technique through the whole poem. He has a really beautiful poem about rivers , where he’s just giving the names of rivers he’s encountered. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Falling in love with something that you thought you disliked is really important for an artist. It’s all about changing your mind and becoming something else, getting a bigger and wider view of yourself.”

Reeves is an avid runner; for him, running is a moving meditation. While getting his PhD at UT Austin 10 or so years ago, he went out for a run one morning near campus. A homeless man began following him, threatening him with the same slur over and over. He wrote “Cross Country,” in response to the incident, examining the slur over and over, until it becomes almost like an onomatopoeia:

When I ran, it rained niggers. Early in October— the first creases of autumn, a flag-weary sky in which yellow birds, in flight, slip through the breast- bone of God and tear at the coarse threads that keep the morning knit tightly around his heart. What was it that they sang about the light, their tongues, the thistles they pluck from the bitter bark of an allthorn then thrust into the breast of whatever god or good animal requires eating, a good piercing?

“What do we do when we take a word and play with its context?” asks Reeves. “The poem can take the word chair and not make it a chair. Or take a tree and turn it into a coyote. This is the power of the poem — the naming aspect. So let’s play with naming. What this man thinks he’s marking by calling me this, but also expanding that mark to be something that he didn’t consider.”

The poem is layered with all kinds of texture: uneasiness, sensuousness, salt, and glitter. As it progresses, the word becomes more than the word, more than itself. Reeves manages to turn the thing which keeps punching you square in the sternum, into a human heartbeat.

“Cross Country” was written a decade ago, but not surprisingly it has received attention once again since the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia earlier this year. Reeves gets why this piece feels relevant right now — because it has always been happening.

“All you have to do is be paying attention to a Black life to know what’s about to occur. Black folks have always been running; running, just trying to be beautiful.”

I ask Reeves what it’s like to be back in Austin after all these years, and he expresses the usual gripes: too big, too crowded, too expensive. He misses the coziness of that smaller city with its better music scene, if not better food scene.

Roger first moved here in the summer of 2007 to pursue an MFA from UT’s James A. Michener Center, followed by a PhD in Creative Writing. Prior to Austin, he was at Texas A&M completing an MA in English.

He tells me, almost with fondness, how there had been a lot of flooding in town that summer, and part of the lake was closed. The image instantly takes me to the line in “Cross Country:”

Running through a city that is running out of water.

Reeves writes about cities like he writes about everything else: with his undivided attention. I ask him what is his favorite city, and he says Atlanta, explaining it’s where he learned that the South is still the spiritual homeland for a lot of Black people.

“For me, Atlanta is where I learned everything is possible. There is something about that city that calls you up and calls you out, the way Black people make and hustle and produce there, it really spoke to me.”

As an undergrad, Reeves attended Morehouse College in Atlanta; he says it was really important for his 20-year-old self to live there, but he doesn’t know if his 40-year-old self could do it.

“There are cities you can live in and cities that inspire you,” he laughs before adding, “Maybe I should spend more time in Madrid.”

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Dark Days Summary

Fugitive essays, roger reeves.

Audiobook Online

Description, free pdf download, chapter 1 | overview, chapter 2 | the darker aspects of human nature are often revealed in times of crisis and adversity, shining light on the complexity of the human experience., chapter 3 | through stories of hardship and struggle, dark days emphasizes the resilience and strength that can emerge from the depths of despair., chapter 4 | despite the challenges and darkness that life may bring, there is always a glimmer of hope and humanity that persists in the darkest of times., chapter 5 | dark days review.