King Me Roger Reeves Copper Canyon Press, 2013 Few words locate us in a speaker’s experience more immediately than the first three of Roger Reeves’ debut collection: “I, Roger Reeves…” As if taking up the project of consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s that famously asserted the personal is political, King Me derives its power directly from the “I.” Which is not to say that the whole of this book is stuff from the life of Roger Reeves (or even “Roger Reeves”); here, the “I” bounds from Reeves’s speaker to Van Gogh to French neurologist Duchenne to black, lesbian trumpeter Ernestine “Tiny” Davis to Walt Whitman. Unified by a lyric imagination that asserts a strong, singular voice throughout, these poems explore the various ways we stumble towards an understanding of suffering, of sublimity, and of one another across differences of race, history, sexuality, language, and the ultimate body-boundary that keeps each one of us separate. The collection takes care, too, to explore the transgressions that necessarily occur when we bridge those boundaries in the name of …