Overview

Poetry that considers the nature of relationships in an age mediated by social media and impacted by violence. This is a collection of poems about how we find and cultivate love amid wars, including wars that often go ignored. Throughout Bloodletting, Kimberly Reyes considers how we define love and who gets to experience it, paying special attention to the ways that race and sex influence how we are perceived and valued by society. Through the voice of a Black woman coming to terms with her own perspectives on relationship-building, Reyes shows the damage that contemporary culture can do to women, and Black women in particular. Resisting passivity, Reyes's poetry cuts through pervasive doom scrolling, virtue signaling, and parasocial relationships, inviting readers to remember what care is really supposed to feel like.

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9781632431660

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Reviews

""There is, in Bloodletting, an impressive command of diction that, coupled with her precision for clarity, wit and intense observation, produces a poetry of great insight and intellectual alacrity that makes her a brilliant observer of the complexities of the American present. Whether writing about Taylor Swift, the crisis of global warming, or her father, her capacious sensibility allows for vulnerability, humor and the luminous red of bold cultural commentary. Her poems are beautiful studies in form and sentiment. Reyes' poems have managed the enviable quality of being wholly contemporary and present and at the same time unfettered by time."" -- Kwame Dawes, author of ""Sturge Town"" ""In Bloodletting, Reyes strips herself bare and asks the same of her readers. 'Discomfort is no longer a season,' she writes, and in that discernment, we are given permission to not only feel, but allow rage to boil over and set us free. Reyes poems are so precise, the blade of a knife, carving out the hidden uglies of this world. Full of pop culture references, and the language of the living, this collection dares us to texture everything until we finally find its true center: 'I have no idea what to live for if not love,' we read & poof this collection becomes an act of deep knowing, purposeful, in a world burning too hot for our comfort.""   -- Yesenia Montilla, author of ""The Pink Box"" and ""Muse Found in a Colonized Body"" ""The unfolding honesty of Bloodletting, its cut, just deep enough, feels like a record of a present that might break us. Reyes answers the gaslighting of an entire society with a poet's truth, as she mourns her and our illusions."" -- Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of ""antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano"" and ""lo terciario/ the tertiary""

Author Information

Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, and the author of the poetry collections vanishing point. and Running to Stand Still. Her book of essays Life During Wartime won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work has been published in various outlets including the Atlantic, New York Times, New York Post, Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Village Voice, ESPN the Magazine, Irish Examiner, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, and Best American Poetry Blog. Reyes is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  

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