Select Poetry

Order Bloodletting

Advance press/praise:

Contemplating the nature of relationships in an age of violence and social media, Reyes focuses in particular on the challenges contemporary culture poses for Black women.

—Publishers Weekly

There is, in Kimberly Reyes’s  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's 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 Kimberly 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’s 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

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.—Urayoán Noel, The Latinx Project's ‘La Treintena’ 2023: 30 (Something) Books of Latinx Poetry

Reyes’ own poetic trajectory is bright...—Diego Báez, Unique Niche: Letras Latinas Blog

...in vanishing point. (the period at the end of the title is very much intentional) Reyes’s assays beyond traditional poetry-making are clearly in service of a larger goal, the re-creation and repudiation of history’s injustices.—California Review of Books' 31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023

vanishing point. is an assured experiment in disorientation.­­—The Stinging Fly

Reyes’ lyrics demand and declare, solidifying this perceived otherness into a direct presence.—rob mclennan's blog

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, amazon and other bookstores around the world

 Select Poems

palette poetry Winner of the 2024 Love and Eros Prize:
claiming to know the tense in which love happens
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'
The Offing: Nesting & The Buzz
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
The Acentos Review: Undertones
Atrocious Poets:
Bronzeville Women

Other noted publications

  • “It is maybe time to admit that Caitlin Clark only thought about/had to think about herself in her final NCAA game, and will never be the GOAT” and “I grew up”, Killens Review of Arts & Letters (Spring 2025)
  • "Ghosting", North American Review's Open Space (Spring 2025)
  • “The Male Gaze (A Sonnet)” and “My Face ID Pretends Not To Know Me”, Obsidian (51.1 2025)
  • “The Sigil” and “Had we made it past the heat”, Banshee (Fall 2024)
  • "Séance at the Beauty Parlor", Obsidian (49.1 Fall 2023)
  • "Ascension", Hayden's Ferry Review (Winter 2022)-Pushcart Nominee
  • “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 (Spring 2021)
  • "Candyman", The Poetry Review (Fall 2020)
  • "We're Goin to Save Us," "Megastars" and "'Indian Summer'", About Place Journal (Fall 2020)
  • "Epigenetics, Elegy and Effigy", The Acentos Review's Black and Glorious: Towards Black Liberation Special Juneteenth Issue (Summer 2020)
  • “Crane Lane, Last Call,” “Birthday,” “Drink Before the War,” and “We are all drowned out", 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)