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.” Continue reading
