Dark Days
Fugitive Essays
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
* 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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Reeves (Best Barbarian) interweaves autobiography and American history in his strong nonfiction debut. The elliptical opener, "Our Angel of History," describes a photograph of a Black boy watching a Barack Obama rally in 2008 and uses the boy's "stoic" expression as a metaphor for the necessity of having a clear-eyed understanding of the ensuing decade's racial strife. In "Reading Fire, Reading the Stars," Reeves suggests that interpreting "texts," broadly, has been an integral part of Black American life, citing both runaway enslaved people who "read" the stars as they made their way north and his own childhood Bible study, which gave him the interpretive tools to become a cultural critic. One of the most poignant selections is "Letters to Michael Brown," in which Reeves addresses a series of dispatches to the slain teenager—who was killed by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in 2014—explaining that Reeves's seven-year-old child "fears being shot when she hears sirens." Other entries touch on hush harbors (clandestine church services enslaved people held in the woods), the death of actor Michael K. Williams, and the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Reeves's trademark lyricism ("The pit of the peach swaddled by its flesh, becoming whole there on the limb of the day") shines throughout, proving that he's just as affecting in prose as in verse. This impresses.
