Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, and the author of the poetry collections vanishing point. and Running to Stand Still. Her book of essays Life During Wartime won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work has been published in various outlets including the Atlantic, New York Times, Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Village Voice, ESPN the Magazine, Film Ireland, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, and Best American Poetry Blog. A doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Nebraska, Kimberly spends her time between New York City and Lincoln.
"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."
*Harriet Books*
"It’s easy enough to experiment for experiment’s sake, but
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. vanishing
point. includes color FBI sketches and black and white
etchings, and three times in the book, you turn the page to find a
QR code that takes you to a video poem on YouTube. Reyes also makes
extensive use of dark and light gray to emphasize irony and
erasure, so that readers must strain their eyes to recover text
that has been or is being expunged from the historical record.
Additionally, her many residences and fellowships, including a
Fulbright in Ireland, enrich the book’s already bountiful
content."
*California Review of Books, on "31 Outstanding Poetry Books from
2023"*
"Vanishing point. is an assured experiment in
disorientation. It’s not a matter of getting lost, exactly, but
about losing your bearings, straying from a linear route between
two points into something more shadowy, even unmappable. The
collection is an exercise in trying to locate oneself, as an
individual, in relation to a history of violence that connects
multiple points on the globe. . . . The poems don’t plot
a clear route through the shared histories, but they do map
specific points of contact between them, felt in the body, in the
present."
*The Stinging Fly*
"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*
"[vanishing point] was composed, as [Reyes'] author biography
offers, 'while splitting her time between San Francisco, Ireland,
and her hometown of New York City,' feeling out an articulation of
layerings of a cultural sense of between-ness, including her
connection to multiple points but not feeling entirely at home in
any one. Her writing is staccato, precise . . . Reyes works to
write her way back into view, or to write enough to be seen, before
she completely disappears."
*Rob McLennan*
“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 sits / unbound // darkest places
unimaged.’ 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 The Rendering*
“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, The Talking Heads, Kara Walker, Richard Wright, Sinéad
O’Connor, those echoed words in gray. Vanishing point 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.”
*Martha Ronk, author of The Place One Is*
“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 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*
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