Vanishing Point

By Kimberly Reyes

In her second collection, Vanishing Point, Kimberly Reyes plays with perspectives to challenge the reader. Sections move between the US coasts and across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland, and characters and literary kin repopulate erased landscapes. Reyes lineates Frederick Douglass’s 1846 letter, in which he describes his experiences as a Black man in Ireland. In her version, his text is presented thus:

I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.
 
I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity,
 
claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult.

This affirming narrative is made more complex when Reyes contrasts it with her own harsh experiences of racism on a trip to Ireland and marvels: “His recognition of this is still celebrated (!). As if being defined in a crowd or the glare of whiteness isn’t an unending proposition.”

Reyes uses admonitory sotto voce interjections in delicate grey type to articulate the viewpoints of those who are gone, unborn, or “currently battling against their own disappearing.” In “Séance at the Beauty Parlor,” a head of hair metamorphoses into a threat when hair relaxer seeps through the scalp to the brain:

we weary / we in our crowns our crowns our crowns our crowns we
cannot say we or our crowns our crowns our crowns our crowns we
will us away we warn / we absorb our crowns our crowns our crows

An accompanying epigraph shares that, during autopsies, “[h]ow they identified black women a lot of times was a green layer on top of the brain from relaxing.”

Transmogrification moves across species when the speaker takes the form of a selkie in “Last & Original of Her Species”:

I grow gills & scales
& hear warnings

                   across the fog siloed Merrow
                                        sound alarm

of still estuaries
babies have gone

This intelligent exploration intertwines intimacy and testimony. Drawing on visual works from the public domain and embedding QR codes linking to Reyes’s film poems, hybridity is at the core of this collection.