AFEW minutes into our conversation, the poet Roger Reeves reveals a surprising detail about Dark Days: Fugitive Essays, his third book and first essay collection, published by Graywolf in August. “I didn’t plan on writing a book,” he says before flashing a knowing smile. “But I’m a writer, and when someone says to you…” He trails off, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken. As a fellow multi-genre author and member of the hip-hop generation, I know what this kind of silence means. The first rule of the game in any medium, from rap to nonfiction, is to know your skill set and to stay ready, which Reeves absolutely does. During our nearly two-hour talk, he is genial yet astute, tossing out quotes from DJ Khaled alongside references to Giorgio Agamben and Dante’s Inferno with an ease that gives our conversation a casual but invigorating timbre. Chatting with him makes it clear that if you’re in search of an essay collection whose author can traverse topics as disparate as the Outkast song “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and the Chilean soprano Ayleen Jovita Romero’s defiant rendition of “El derecho de vivir en paz” (“The Right to Live in Peace”), you need look no further than Dark Days.
In 2018 the person looking was Jeff Shotts, an executive editor at Graywolf Press who was in the audience at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in Tampa, Florida, where Reeves read an essay about the poetry of Solmaz Sharif, herself a Graywolf author. After Reeves’s reading, Shotts approached him, wanting to know if he had any other prose. “I have some ideas!” Reeves recalls telling him with a laugh. In that moment, Dark Days was born.
In 2012, when (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) and Ibram X. Kendi’s (Nation Books, 2016) were making waves both within and outside the academy. By then Reeves had made a name for himself as an award-winning poet. His first collection, (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), was a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the Year and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize. Reeves had also been awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2008, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2013, the prestigious Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University the following year, and a Whiting Award in Poetry a year after that. And even while he continued to write poems, collected most recently in his second book, (Norton, 2022), winner of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Reeves took note of the change. “I began to see the essay as a place to enter into public intellectual discourse,” he says. “Even though I think the poem can do everything an essay can do, to some degree, and has as much truth, intellectual rigor, [and] political thought…the essayistic form was saturating America.” So when Shotts threw down the gauntlet, Reeves happily accepted.
