BLOODLETTING
by Kimberly Reyes
Reyes wrestles with race, gender, popular culture, and relationships in this fiery poetry collection.
The book opens with “Red,” a meditation on Taylor Swift’s “fire-engine-Radio-Flyer- / Americana-taste-the-summer” hued lips, and the “currency” between them. In the titular poem, Reyes disavows Swift due to the controversial circumstances surrounding Swift’s partner, Travis Kelce, and his ex-girlfriend, Kayla Nicole, who is Black. Though Reyes once loved Swift because “heartbreak was my story / and she wrote it so well,” the Grammy-winning artist failing to stand up for Nicole during media backlash led to Reyes’ conclusion that the superstar only “cosplayed as a sympathetic character.” In “claiming to know the tense in which love happens,” the poet notes that love’s timeline isn’t linear but is evident in small details, behaviors, and feelings. “It doesn’t always last, / and we don’t all even know that it’s happened, / when it’s happening, / which is the cruelest of all time thefts,” she writes. Reyes draws inspiration from Pulitzer Prize–winning Diane Seuss in “My love for things is partial,” a poem about her father and generational pain. Multiple poems discuss her estrangement from her brother and only sibling because “His girlfriends progressively got lighter / He got bolder. / Then he Ye’d.” “I grew up” contrasts Black and white professional basketball players, including Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Reyes astutely notes that while Johnson smiled “on cue” for the cameras, Larry Bird “got to brood / with vain / moods.” The book concludes with QR codes for a playlist Reyes dubs the “Bloodletting soundtrack.”
Reyes cleverly combines memoir and cultural analysis in this subversive poetry collection. The book’s voice is its greatest strength. Reyes is at once introspective and uncompromising as she analyzes life for Black women in a world that often denies them full personhood. She not only calls out beloved icons, but she also interrogates her own fascination with celebrity. Rather than force a cathartic conclusion to her poems, she instead lets thoughts wander, leaves pages of white space, and invites readers to sit with her in the discomfort of powerlessness and rage. Her visceral descriptions will captivate readers, like when she compares the “silent synchronized / contraction, this tremble” of shivering bees to the “overproduced concert of crickets” and “melodrama / of cicadas who leave so much carcass in their wake.” Her descriptions of celebrities are equally creative and sometimes literary, like one of professional basketball player Angel Reese, who Reyes declares has “nearly perfect baby hair // ends curved with the precision of Artemis’ bow, / yet soft and doe-like as an Oread’s touch.” Imagining her father as a child, she paints a clear, touching portrait of him at Coney Island, “happy / eating pee-water franks and vandalizing gray fire hydrants to unleash // cold fury.” Many of Reyes’ poems, however, are unfocused; the titular poem pinballs among myriad topics, including U2 frontman Bono, the Israel-Palestine conflict, astrology, Taylor Swift’s love life, and social media. With so many detours, Reyes’ message occasionally gets lost. But the strength and original delivery of the ideas here make up for the meandering.A fierce, involving analysis of modern culture that sometimes wanders off topic.