MOPES

Kenneth Reveiz’s first full collection, MOPES, opens with brash repetition and subtle variation. “Art” is a disquisition and denunciation: “White people jarring honey,” “White people treating people of color like shit,” “White people being Eurocentric,” “White people reviewing art by people of color that challenges the dominant structures of power and calling it bad art.” 

“Mope” is a marvelous word to twist for Reveiz’s too-valid plaints. Divided into three “acts” and two “intermissions,” the book includes “Heart Mope,” “Pulitzer Mope,” and “Lambda Mope,” which ends:

I would actually love to give you head, and like, care for you,
     if you wanted.
Dump the clown / live in gloriousness with me.
plz

In more traditionally tuned love poems, such as “Gegenüber (Schwules Museum),” Reveiz melds sentiment and the body. Lyric expansion is punctured and reclaimed. Observations such as:

                                                  […] i feel i have
                          and want not to have but have
              would be            fuck
              the beginning             of a kiss
                               or your cum on my face

are tempered by lines about how:

           there is time            that i passed with
                                                                              you
            it occurred               and it is nice
                      to know that you are a thing in my life
           that i like to have in my life
           and want to have more in my life

There is less softness in “Disspoem,” a deeply violent account of a killing spree styled as a film script, which pivots to a first-person prose block: “I am not someone to speak Spanish to unless it’s obvious we should be doing that, I am no longer someone to pity as suicidal or troubled because i’m the gayest.”

Reveiz’s vacillation between profane enervation and a conflicted vulnerability forms the book’s central energy. In “Charity,” they write: 

You must read our disgusting poetry,

which is not for sale, & disorder
your daily jogging charitable billionaire enthusiasm
     mutilatedly fuckface
now. i am amassing
faggot-brown limb buckets. i am dumping

them bloodily on the Power steps. Power
-bottom steps.
                                 See? For them it’s not enough.