Keynote
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Brenda Hillman
Book Title
Reach
Subtitle
A Poem
Cover Image
Poem Excerpt
He moves back to his hometown in the summer
He writes to his brother his fathers his sister
his mother Now my child is saying your names Now my child
is walking and speaking and one day
his shoulders burning as he cleans his mother’s pool he sees
she is crying and she tells him
the story again of carrying him in the violence of those long ago
years she says You kept me
from ending my life and his eyes on the water he has heard this
story before but now it is different
it is his story too . . .
—from Reach
Body
New fatherhood sends the speaker of Gabriel Antonio Reed’s Reach back to the tenderness and hurt of his own childhood. Moments with his child in the garden elicit memories of his grandmother, and intimate dreams about people outside of his romantic relationship recall his parents’ histories and the queer experiences of his youth. Despite his own mental health struggles, his child becomes a reason to persist, which mirrors the role he played in his own mother’s life.
Even as poems unearth patterns of care and harm, they turn to the sources of pain with radical empathy. Reed challenges the poetic line to reflect this dynamic, using indented pseudocouplets that imply a feeling too large for a margin. Through butterflies and shadows, kind words from friends and wisdom from Reed’s creative influences, this debut collection argues that writing can be part of the way we tend to one another and to ourselves.
List Price
$17.00
