Select Poetry

Order vanishing point.

Directly from Kimberly or from UCP

An unflinching collection of poems from a bold literary voice.—KIRKUS

This intelligent exploration intertwines intimacy and testimony. Drawing on visual works from the public domain and embedding QR codes linking to Reyes’s film poems, hybridity is at the core of this collection.—Poetry Foundation

Spanning New York, Puerto Rico, Ireland, and beyond, Black Nuyorican poet Reyes brings together census records, FBI sketches, and QR codes to the author’s poetry films into a meditation on the limits of visibility.—The Latinx Project

Kimberly Reyes insists that we remember the histories and identities erased by the work of empire and patriarchy. Traversing continents, oceans, and historical eras, Reyes utilizes archive, video poems, séance, and an unrelenting lens that refuses “a cozy invisibility.” This collection affirms the need to preserve histories on the precipice of being consumed and forgotten. Through the visual use of gradient text, Reyes amplifies and conjures what is at risk of being sent into the silence of white noise. Be it in California, Ireland, Puerto Rico, or popular culture, Reyes calls our attention to the “ivory-stroked / false purity—” and the “misappropriation // of American gothic / how blackness seeds / the bayou / humidity of unburied fruit.” Amid all the weight, there is a tender cradling of the lyric that re-animates a sense of home and a refusal to be displaced: “we are still / we are memory.” vanishing point. is rich in language and it is a gift to follow Reyes as she delves into what must be known and what must be spoken to sculpt and imagine a new cartography.—Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha

Kimberly Reyes has written an innovative and magnetic book. Each poem spirals beautifully by itself but when I finished reading, I realized I had encountered and entered new architecture. Here, thinking radiates to illuminate the ‘absorbing ghosts’ of the self and the familial and the ‘living shadows’ of oppressive historical forces. Here, the language is lyrical, layered, and spectral. Here, the ‘hyphen is a rejection of negative space.’ Reyes is an astonishingly gifted poet and this book enlarges and complicates what the page can hold back, reveal.—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

Kimberly Reyes' latest collection vanishing point. contains hauntings within the text, echoes in the graphics. There are diagrams and QR codes, landscape and demographics that impress upon readers the emptiness from missing—that map of dispossessions, the collapse of stars—and the fullness of looking, of looking closer. Here, people faced with survival keep looking back and up and through disaster to ask: Who are the living? or: What does it feel like? and: Is this pleasure? This is a thoughtful, serious exploration of expirations and hollows, stains and swells, the soil salted over blood, flame, memory.—Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden

vanishing point. ranges effortlessly over epochs, oceans, continents, casting a wryly compassionate, implacable eye on North America, Southern Ireland and the complex histories that bind them. It consolidates one of the freshest, most searching voices on either side of the Atlantic.—Billy Ramsell, author of The Architect’s Dream of Winter

vanishing point. suggests a disappearance, and the print does occasionally fade from black to gray, yet the poems in this book present a vivid original presence by means of adroit language, strong emotion, imaginative leaps. It is a unique work, wide-ranging, heart-rending—attuned to the multiple forms of who one is, black and certainly blue. But also multiple and nuanced in the twists and turns of lines, sound, spacing, vocabulary—a complexity that is can’t help but rattle and move the reader. The poems are wonderfully attentive to rhythm, even as they include QR codes, documents, quotations, and the words of others, for example, Fred Moten, Kara Walker, Richard Wright, Sinéad O’Connor, those echoed words in gray.

VP raises the significant questions of where one belongs and who one is, but it is also a book of tenderness and compassion for the larger world where destruction exists in history, around every corner, for those who pick grapes, for black women, for race horses, for birds (“for every bird there is a stone/thrown at a bird…for every child/there is a womb cold.”)

No one with roots doubled under

Can survive these days

I tried I’ve travelled I’m tired

Quickly decipher—thrasher, starling

Define invasive species, mimicry

Can’t tell if the cry is a crow or my stomach

God protect me from its sensual coo

—Martha Ronk, author of The Place One Is

ALSO AVAILABLE AT POWELL'S, GREEN APPLE BOOKS, B&N, WATERSTONES, BOOKTOPIA, ABEBOOKS, AMAZON, BOOKSHOP AND OTHER BOOKSTORES AROUND THE WORLD.

Order Running to Stand Still

"Rich in literary and pop culture references, the voice of Running to Stand Still is both specific and wide-ranging. Quotations from artists as disparate as Frank Bidart and The Killers splice and introduce poems. In one section, Reyes repurposes screenshots of text messages; in another, partial strikethroughs enable multiple readings. Through this juxtaposing of different forms and language, Reyes weaves a deeply intimate portrait out of impossibly expansive themes: modern life, Black womanhood, family history, and technology."
"Examining the Black female body through histories and stories, Reyes offers a lyric of restless music. Her preoccupation with the gaze of others and storytelling extends beyond boundaries, creating a layered narrative of power and self."
Valerie Wallace, author of House of McQueen
“These poems, with through lines of gender, race, adventure, desire, build into a deeply moving provocation of loss and discovery. The brilliance of these poems is their achievement of discomfit as they simultaneously travel distance and move inward. . . . The title of this collection is a promise: how poetry can at once run and stand still, and why that matters.”
Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ
"Pinballing between family lore, social media, and pop culture discourse, Reyes deconstructs the casual discourses of contempt her narrators are invited to embrace outside and within blood lines, however much 'birthright belonging / is the maim.' And yet, betrayed by the human desire to belong ('To be kept is to / be kept, and what you wanted'), they—she—never quite reach escape velocity: Running to Stand Still is thus the poignant record of an orbit, both victory and impasse."'
Brandi George, author of Gog
"In a poem about visiting Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby, Reyes writes, 'This is church. This is collateral. This is holy terrain. / I am ekphrasis, imbued to the frame.' How powerful is poetry? Can it write a woman into existence? Can it help a woman to exist in a world that denies her complexity? Kimberly Reyes’s collection, Running to Stand Still, has made me a believer. Her poems, sonically sharp and mysterious, create a self that is able to stand, to withstand, the horrors of the past and present."
Running to Stand Still stays true to its title, creating an orbiting, a gravitational pull that at once keeps us distant and brings us close. Reyes pulls off a unique feat of storytelling; at times jarring and at times slow paced, we as readers are made to experience both the stability and velocity of her narrative.
Available at Bookshop, Powell's, Green Apple Books, Waterstones, booktopia and other bookstores around the world

 

Order the chapbook Warning Coloration

 

Also available at City Lights Books in San Francisco

 Select Poems

american poet: The Uncanny Valley
 academy of american poets:
The Body
Winner of the 2018 Harold Taylor Prize
The Poetry Society:
A Constitution
Video
'Behind the Poem'
Atrocious Poets:
Bronzeville Women
Yemassee: The Blueprint

Mass Poetry

Sporklet: Upon the realization that you don't have a natural habitat & The Roost
Eleven Eleven: The Outback
RHINO: Opening Lines
Juked: Intermission
Leveler: 2.14
The Acentos Review: Undertones

Other noted publications

  • "Ascension", Hayden's Ferry Review (Winter 2022)-Pushcart Nominee
  • "Séance at the Beauty Parlor", Obsidian (49.1)
  • “The foundation is likely beyond repair”, “corralled to complicit”, and “Don’t Let it Trouble Your Mind”, PROTOTYPE 4 (2022 anthology)
  • "Presentiment", Poetry London (Fall 2022)
  • "Tim Burton says I'm not his aesthetic" and "literacy", The Stinging Fly (Summer 2022)
  • "Frederick Douglass Aboard a Sonnet", Southword (Fall 2021)
  • "Stain In Creases", Poetry Ireland Review (Spring 2021)
  • "Candyman", The Poetry Review (Fall 2020)
  • "We're Goin to Save Us and other poems", About Place Journal (Fall 2020)
  • "Epigenetics, Elegy and Effigy", The Acentos Review Black and Glorious: Towards Black Liberation Special Juneteenth Issue (Summer 2020)
  • "Birthday and other poems", Poethead (Summer 2020)
  • "The crow is barking up a storm", The Stinging Fly (Summer 2020)
  • ·“The chill in the air,” “like backwards rain on the dashboard,” “Reanimation, “The Holidays,” and “The sickness”, Newtown Literary (Summer, 2020)
  • "An é Éireannach atá ionat?", Quarryman (Spring 2020)
  • "Imprint", Mary (Summer 2019)
  • “Heat Lightning/The Split Tree”– Finalist, Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Obsidian (Spring 2019)
  • “The Late Bloom” and “Recognition”, Berkeley Public Library Poem in Your Pocket Day (April 2018)
  • “@ Plannned Parenthood the Week Before the Inaguration”, Cosmonauts Avenue (Spring 2018)
  • “Push Notifications”, Paris Lit Up (Winter 2018)
  • “To fit the description,” “@ Plannned Parenthood the Week Before the Inaguration” – Winner of the Mark Linenthal Award (May 2016 and May 2017) “December,” “Push Alerts” – Honorable Mention for the Mark Linenthal Award, Transfer Magazine (December 2017)
  • “Blood in the Soil”, New American Writing (Spring 2017)
  • “Your last name is Reyes…is your husband Spanish,” “Hype Women,” “The Stage,” “Holding Pattern,” “A Piece of him”, Moko Magazine (December 2016)
  • “Beloved,” and “Fitting In”, Columbia Journal (September 2016)
  • “The Weigh In,” “The Dance,” and “Cape Town” – Poetry Prize Finalist, The Feminist Wire (February 2015)
  • “NYC” and “Cicadas”, belleville park pages (April and December 2014)

Anthologies

Sh!t Men Say To Me: A Poetry Anthology in Response to Toxic Masculinity (Moon Tide Press, Spring 2021)

Love is the Drug and Other Dark Poems (Red Light Lit, Summer 2018)