“Poets Reclaim Radiant Power”: Taneum Bambrick, James Fujinami Moore & Roger Reeves

James Fujinami Moore’s work has appeared in Barrow Street’s 4x2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. The collection indecent hours (Four Way Books) is his first. For Moore, the past is never past. In this brutal debut, sensual, political, and imagined worlds collide, tracing a history of diaspora and trauma that asks: What do we do in the aftermath of violence, and why do we long to inflict it? Moore’s poems trace over intimate details with surprising humor, fierce eroticism, and a restless eye, from Vegas boxing rings and the heated sands of Manzanar to the scrolling horrors of a Facebook feed.

Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of various fellowships and awards. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton & Company), his expansive second volume, Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity – climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy, and loss. The poems roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s 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. Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with – and sometimes contradicting – Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to address itself “only to freedom.”

Taneum Bambrick’s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Nation, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, PEN, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. Intimacies, Received (Vantage) is her second collection and was chosen for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book award. In Intimacies, Received, violence hides in the glint of the carving knife – every intimacy a shadow, every memory a maze to navigate. Set primarily in rural Southern Spain, the poems move through streets, fields, households, and years, following a survivor of sexual assault as she painstakingly reassembles a narrative of self. A brilliant storyteller, Bambrick builds through palimpsest – layering vivid imagery to recall embodiment and dissociation, illness and isolation, and queer female sexuality amidst acts of misogyny. Ultimately, the collection signals agency, as trauma is held to the light and finally named.