Straddling the wreckage of late capitalist America, the poems in Kenneth Reveiz’s MOPES arc urgently toward utopia—or at least they do their best. The intimate eros of liberated queerness is interrupted, undermined by a flood of dystopian American violence. The choice to fight for love and justice roars from each page with a poet’s heart and an activist’s ferocity. Breaking new ground in queer and Latinx writing, MOPES is a provocative, political, and paradigm-shifting coming-of-age story about revolutionary disappointment.
Winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize
~~~~~~~Praise~for~MOPES~~~~~~~
"MOPES opens with brash repetition and subtle variation...a disquisition and denunciation. 'Mope' is a marvelous word to twist for Reveiz’s too-valid plaints."
—Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
“What Kenneth Reveiz does to language in MOPES is very impressive. By disarticulating language, they really articulate desire. It's like they're arm or body wrestling with the language. A struggle. A kind of vigorous embrace that alters the natural or regular rhythm of things. Reveiz reinvents the lyric of love by making the absence or the desire or the refusal of the other into opportunities of rhythmic or lexical inventiveness. I really love it.”
—Stéphane Bouquet, author of Common Life
"With unrelenting indignation and remarkable tenderness, Kenneth Reveiz gives voice to the razing of respectability while mending the fissures of a body’s abjection in the totalizing ether of whiteness. In its three-act structure, MOPES directs a series of scene-changes that oscillate abruptly in mood and matter—a riotous counter-ethnographic anti-monument; a gruesome video game killing spree reflecting yet another day in the United States; performances of laughter and boredom as a cover for affliction; and as many-sided attributions of sex as to queer “class hatred under the moonlight.” Reveiz punctuates with lol’s and heart-signs, or with mimicries of Elizabethan English, to throttle the artifice of establishment value. In strains at once breakneck, salacious, mordant, and loudly opposed, Reveiz seeks a poetry tantamount to the 'most fucking amazing fully distanceless thing'—that is, unapologetic and adequate to the task of the present."
— Roberto Tejada, author of Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness: History & Metaphor
Kenneth Reveiz writes us a book for the present, for the true now, for the actual 2022, the impossible world they inherited from multiple ancestors. The past is never dead, it's not even past, said Faulkner, and Reveiz says, Look at Me Now and Here I Am because the present isn’t dead either—even though it appears that way since we can't touch it and can’t feel it and can’t even find language for our disconnected experience of it (unless it's Facebook chats or Instagram followers, how many?). But what happened in between scrolling, we had a life, we still have a life, or at least a body, we are still scrambling to even know what it means to connect to another person, or even to a word. Reveiz says a poem is not a poem is not a poem, and after all, the only important thing is to allow ourselves to actually feel that loneliness, and keep breathing, keep enduring: it's gonna be OK—Reveiz has our back.
— Nina Menkes, director of Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
"Kenneth Reveiz is an acerbic, deft commentator on queer eros, joy, and disappointment, and is at the same time a honey-pot, bringing hot feelings. These precisely shaped and distributed poems confront traps of dominant culture and paradigms, including whiteness and white art, deftly dismantling by their very presence. A frontal collection with concerns ranging from desire to aesthetics to the absolute exigency of lived social equality across race and culture, MOPES is sure to make you cry and laugh."
—Rebecca Wolff, Fence editor, Fence Modern Poets Series judge
