vanishing point.

by Kimberly Reyes

Overview

A collection by award-winning poet Kimberly Reyes that explores erased histories.
 
Through her latest collection, Kimberly Reyes navigates the physical, hereditary, and liminal worlds between land, time, and memory. The poems in vanishing point. take us to San Francisco, Ireland, and the Atlantic Ocean, reclaiming and examining contested space as the poet seeks to revive left-behind histories, reconsider what we see, and reveal what we cannot see.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632431196
Publisher:	Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	04/05/2023
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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, New York Post, Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Village Voice, ESPN the Magazine, Irish Examiner, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, and Best American Poetry Blog. Reyes is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Editorial Reviews

"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

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

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

"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

"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

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

"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. 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

"[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

"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."

on "31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023" California Review of Books

2023-04-21
Reyes presents a collection of poems exploring race.

The political is personal in this poetry collection that focuses on issues of race and the poet’s own identity as a Black Nuyorican woman. Reyes begins by contrasting a letter from Frederick Douglass, in which he praises the Irish’s treatment of him, with her own experience of racism as she traveled from England to Ireland. In “On the ghettoization of childless women,” she observes that “Life is shorter & narrower than it should be for / those of us not meant for your social security.” In “séance at the Beauty Parlor,”she compares Black women who use relaxer to elephants evolving to lose their tusks. Reyes incorporates research into her poems, sharing that at least 40% of White households in New York included a slave in 1711, as well as a New York Timesstatistic citing the alarming death rate of BIPOC women due to pregnancy-related causes. The author includes several visual elements, including victim sketches by the prolific serial killer, Samuel Little, as well as a copy of the 14th United States census circa 1920. Throughout the book, Reyes rails against marginalization and censorship by “well-meaning white folks.” But weariness seems to set in by the end: “Do you ever stop / & wonder what you too lost / Or nah, it’s cool here” (“ghost thought”). The author plays with form—even the color of the text—to suggest truth fading away. The writing is as clever as it is complex: In “The crow is barking up a storm,”the author writes, “Five black males talk, / they call it a murder.” Her descriptions strike a delicate balance between beauty and brutality, such as the “Crimson-black grapes” that “hang taut before / the harvesting / flame” that are part of the “cruel horticulture” of winemaking (“Paradise as tinder”).Reyes deftly combines historical fact with modern cultural touchstones such as director Tim Burton and the 23&Me DNA testing service. She also includes QR codes that link to YouTube readings of her work. The chaotic narrative could make some readers feel overwhelmed and unmoored—this may be the poet’s intention.

An unflinching collection of poems from a bold literary voice.

Kirkus Reviews