Kimberly Reyes’ poetry is obsessed with the fragmentation of both the memory and the body. In her debut collection, Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019), Reyes recounts a life of unrelenting anti-Blackness, familial and generational trauma, and the inherent violences of dating in the digital age. Surprisingly, rather than focus solely on the interior narrative of a Black woman speaker, Reyes jarringly places us at the periphery amongst characters who enact violence on her. Past lovers, classmates, family members, and pop culture figures build an echo chamber for the speaker’s experience. While the “I” is constant, the speaker, passive and matter-of-fact, acts as a window providing the reader a glimpse into the incessant, ignorant, and truly degrading interactions that haunt her everyday life. Through sharing the lived experiences of a Black, Puerto Rican woman speaker, Running to Stand Still suggests there is no escaping the horror of both memory and body, how they are inherently fragmented and their boundaries broken without consent.
Throughout Running to Stand Still, Reyes presents this fragmentation of memory within personal and cultural lineages. Through the creation and use of terms such as rememory and dismemory, Reyes plays with the conception of truth as it applies to Black womanhood as the book’s speaker grapples with what she can recall and what others recall for her. In the third poem of the book, “Rememory,” she writes “My mother, the one to recall / this day, for me.” Ancestral and familial women anchor many poems in the opening sections of the book as the speaker’s mother, grandmother, and even the famous poet Gwendolyn Brooks act as gatekeepers to memory. In “Epigenetics, Elegy and Effigy” Reyes writes about finding her great great grandmother’s name in an online database, which conveniently leaves out who she was enslaved to. The closing lines: “women without a world / that won’t claim / us / or how our mothers / only knew / birthright belonging / is the maim.” To remember is to harm oneself, and so Reyes leaves the burden of memory to others, doubling down on her aversion to her own recollections. She writes in one poem, “I can’t be expected to recollect every detail,” in another “so my narration is jerky, / preemptive, unreliable,” and yet in another “liars are the most reliable people you know.”
We see this fragmentation of memory brought to a modern context in “The Body”:
you keep reading about this woman
you don’t know
(Maybe you knew?)
back in j-school,
it was j-school so,
really,
details you should remember.
this woman disappeared.
people (Some you know you know.)
are memorializing
and celebrating her work.
they say she was smart, fearless,
always smiling.
divers found her head
today,
and suddenly you realize
you didn’t know it was missing,
you didn’t know what happened,
you scrolled but,
stopped to read a funny post
about Project Runway.
thought about Heidi Klum
how her nickname was ‘the body.’
Reyes captures the everyday feeling of being at odds with your own recollection of events. This poem, of five pages, is the longest in the collection, dealing not only with her mis-recollection of the story of this woman’s death but also the various distractions, from Project Runway and Heidi Klum to social media overall, that impede her from engaging with death further. These “distractions” point to the shortening of our attention spans and the quickness with which we react to others, both strangers and not, in modern society.
Many of Reyes’ poems feature characters reacting to the speaker’s very existence as a Black woman. In a particularly striking section entitled “The Messages,” Reyes pastes “screenshots of select messages received over the course of a week through online dating sites.” One reads “you are enchanting and so / sexy, I want to cuddle you and / adore you and own you and / make you feel desired for / longterm, do you dislike it?” Here the text message itself becomes the found poem, as a stranger seeks to own the speaker. Reyes includes no responses to these messages, rather allowing each to stand on its own, again taking the speaker out of her own narrative and bodily construction.
In “The Weigh In,” Reyes most strongly implements this removal of the speaker’s agency, introducing the reader to six different romantic partners in six standalone stanzas by their location and the speaker’s weight at the time:
New London, Connecticut. Spring, 2010. [ (138 pounds) ]: Chris,
White American, pulls out chairs, opens doors. Tall. Finally
makes you feel like a woman, a girl. Especially when he bends
down. Shouts at you. At home. Outside cafes. (Outside—with
you!) He picks up the tab. Holds your hand. Admires how
even your wrists are tiny. He talks of exes. Constantly. You
meet one. Exotic (and pretty, she was pretty, right? You hope
pretty is his type), petite, Puerto Rican and Chinese. But she
gained weight. His disapproval. His head shake. He finds you
between leap years. He loves that you’re not the type to let
yourself go.
Reyes jarringly establishes the speaker’s weight as biographical information, as commonplace as location or time of year. The speaker’s dangerous obsession with gender expectations and beauty standards becomes normalized and ingrained, working in service to the space given to each man’s commentary on the speaker’s body. Unwittingly the reader builds the speaker’s body through outside narrative while simultaneously learning about the speaker’s voice as she tries to live up to this man’s standard of beauty. Rather than getting the reaction we desire, i.e. an enraged speaker who rails against this misogyny, we are shown a reserved speaker, one who wishes to placate rather than cause conflict.
In centering a reserved speaker, Reyes adds to the passivity of an already seemingly passive narrative approach. The reader in essence must fill the poem with their own stance, their own rage, their own reaction, compelling us to take an active role. Nowhere does Reyes more clearly dissect this passivity in the face of a boundary broken than in “The Uncanny Valley,” a poem about the speaker’s visit to Kara Walker’s arts installation of a stereotypical Black Southern housemaid turned sphinx of sugar, entitled “A Subtlety.” A powerful irony is created as the speaker, while engaging with an artistic piece commenting on the exploitation of Black women, is interrupted: a white woman “came in between me and the Sugar Baby. / A marvel. Inside a moment of prayer. / Flick of blonde hair. Phone in my face: Take our photo?! / [ ] / You won’t?! / God, / you girls, like, always need a fight! / [ ] / This is church. This is collateral. This is holy terrain. / I am ekphrasis, imbued to the frame.” The very exploitation “A Subtlety” is contending with manifests itself right before the speaker’s eyes.
Reyes’ poetics work on multiple levels; in stating that the speaker is ekphrasis, the Black woman’s body itself is made art, framed and left to an outsider’s feelings and perception. This woman’s body does not respond, as the art she is viewing cannot respond. Even in this seemingly “holy terrain,” the boundary of a Black woman’s body is not respected. This poem therefore becomes the blueprint for reading the collection as a whole, one where Reyes presents a speaker trapped by the boundaries of perception, forced to endure the “imbued” sentiments of all those who come into contact with her.
Beyond her syntax and content, Reyes uses nuanced form to convey a sense of fragmented memory and body. Throughout Running to Stand Still’s 88 pages Reyes uses epigraphs, broken epigraphs, song lyrics, and movie titles, telling us in her “Logistical Notes” that she even uses “direct quotes pulled from the narrator’s journey, to the best of her recollection.” These cover a range of artists, writers, bands, websites, and cultural icons from U2 to Frank Bidart to kidshealth.org to Angela Carter. All of her nine sections begin with quotes and many poems include quotes. By inserting italicized quotes into poems Reyes teaches us how to read her work. The poem’s body is in essence penetrated by these italicized, othering voices, fragmenting even the sacred space of Reyes’ genre. The boundaries she breaks in trying to fit as many voices as possible into Running to Stand Still reflect the daily boundaries ignored and disrespected. No one, the book suggests, seems to respect the various boundaries, sacred or not, of the Black experience.
Running to Stand Still stays true to its title, creating an orbiting, a gravitational pull that at once keeps us distant and brings us close. Reyes pulls off a unique feat of storytelling; at times jarring and at times slow paced, we as readers are made to experience both the stability and velocity of her narrative. Through the book’s use of numerous voices, we are able to orbit the speaker’s experiences as a Black woman in America, in all its broken boundaries and fragmented memory. Through the act of imbuing our own sentiments onto the narrative, we are implicated, just as those who force themselves into the speaker’s world are. In turn, Reyes forces us to break the boundaries of the speaker’s life, creating a complicated and often violent experience that she knows all too well. By the end, we feel Reyes’ exhaustion but know deeply that we are at the same place we started.
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Noel Quiñones is a Puerto Rican writer, performer, and community organizer born and raised in the Bronx. As a writer, he’s received fellowships from Poets House, the Poetry Foundation, CantoMundo, Candor Arts, and SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts). His work has been published in Kweli Journal, Rattle, Hot Metal Bridge, and the Latin American Review. As a performer, he’s featured at Lincoln Center, Harvard University, BAM, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and the Honolulu Museum of Art to name a few. He is the founder of Project X, a Bronx-based arts organization, and was named one of New York State’s “40 Under 40 Rising Latino Stars” by The Hispanic Coalition. He is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Mississippi. Follow him at noelpquinones.com or online @noelpquinones.
