Bloodletting: poems by Kimberly Reyes

 

Had we made it past the heat, 

the honey,
we could have thawed semi-sweet 

& ekphrastic, waking to rewatch
our black & white film, 

retracing lines of dialogue
as we stumble 

over cryonic sieves
of affection 

in a quell we’d call history,
cold fidelity, 

as we’d learn new ways
to hate & hard-swallow, 

embalming the savor
of when we were present— 

an oiled kernel,
a muscle pre-spasm— 

forever technicolor 

Recently in my mailbox landed “poet, essayist, teacher, pop culture scholar, 2^nd generation NYer” Kimberly Reyes’ third full-length collection, Bloodletting: poems (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), following the incredible debut Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn, 2019) and vanishing point. (Omnidawn, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Bloodletting explores and articulates a distillation of pop culture and violence both global and localized across sharp lyric, writing counterpoints and contradictions across the present moment of the American landscape—Taylor Swift and the devastation of Gaza, TikTok videos, femicide and the male gaze, Golems and smartphones—somehow all provided equal weight through mainstream culture. “gave her everything he’d previous withheld / from the women / who looked like the women / whose scarred, arched backs / he leapfrogged / on his way / to the Capital.” she writes, as part of the extended title poem. “He chose violence, / casual warfare, / firing up all manner of ballistics: / indifference, carcass, cruelty… [.]” Offering sharp observation and distillation, Reyes asks the reader to question what stories get told and by whom, and what might this end up doing to our attention. As she writes, mid-way through the collection: “The rage of one person can be cataclysmic.”

Through Reyes, text fades and rages, overlaps and is crossed out. “pain is personal and runs parallel,” she writes further through her title poem, “and relative / and // I have no idea what to live for if not love.” This is a complex, devastating and propulsive collection of poems fully able to simultaneously live within and respond to the present moment, in remarkable ways. She cuts through the noise, the bluster, and gets to the heart of it, providing clarity and clear resistance. As the opening poem “Red” ends: “The shit’s been building for millennium /////// —lean in.”