One From Another

A presentation from 2021–2022 Suzanne Young Murray Fellow Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves is a poet and an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin. During his fellowship, Reeves is working on a poetry project, “One From Another,” which takes up the task of deploying ecstasy as a protest aesthetic, as a disruption of racial terror. Through the use of free verse as well as more traditional forms, such as the abecedarian, elegy, and ode, these poems engage the singing of James Baldwin, the images, details, and metaphors of the current protest movement, the ontology and epistemology of the hush harbor, and subversive sites of study during slavery to create a long song that sings out of the largesse of black life, a song that sings of a future that is both ecstatic and defiant.

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