Along with MOJA Arts Festival, Buxton Books is proud to present Roger Reeves in celebration of his book, Dark Days. Roger will be in conversation with local poet and College of Charleston professor Gary Jackson. This FREE event begins at 7:00 pm and will be held in the Camden Room at the Charleston Visitor Center (375 Meeting St.) as part of the MOJA on King Block Party.
Renowned for his poetry, Dark Days is Roger Reeves debut work of nonfiction. Dark Days, a collection of “fugitive” essays, has been receiving critical acclaim since its August release.
“Stunning. . . . In a variety of pieces exploring race and legacy and community, Reeves captures the sorrows inherent in the way we live today even while keeping a keen eye toward opportunity for joy.”—Maris Kreizman, Vulture
“Reeves rejects fundamentally unjust political institutions in favor of small-scale practices that cultivate community in the absence of power. . . . He calls for art that locates liberation in quotidian moments. Spaces like the barbershop, the nightclub, the church and the ‘hush harbor’—secretive antebellum religious meetings that offered respite from slavery—become sites where we can hone our imaginations and carve out freedom amid oppression.”—Ismail Muhammad, The New York Times Book Review
“With this text, [Reeves] inclines toward his ideal of the ecstatic, defiantly daring to build the sort of life—intellectual and free—so easily denied to Black Americans. A cerebral, ruminative essay collection brimming with insight and vision.”—Kirkus Reviews
We can’t wait to hear Roger and Gary further explore these ideas as part of the MOJA Arts Festival.
This is a free event with no RSVP required. We hope you’ll join us!
About the Book:
In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.
Together, these groundbreaking essays build a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground. “The peace we fight and search for,” Reeves writes, “begins and ends with being still.”