"trap a thought and sit with or wrestle with it until it reveals its purpose": An Interview with Kimberly Reyes on Bloodletting

Buy: Bloodletting by Kimberly Reyes | Omnidawn | May 2025 | 128 pages | ISBN: 978-1632431660

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Laura Villareal (LV):  I’ve been a fan of your poetry for a while, so I’m thrilled to be asking you questions about your latest book, Kimberly. It was so nice to meet you at AWP in Los Angeles where you read tarot cards at Letras Latinas’ booth. I still get chills when I think about the reading you did for me. I used to run a series of interviews called Writers Talking About Anything but Writing, because I love hearing writers talk about their passions and inevitably, they end up talking about writing anyways. Since we met at the convergence of writing and tarot, what are three things you are passionate about outside of writing? What draws you to these things?

Kimberly Reyes (KR): I’m so excited to sit with your questions Laura, as it was so lovely getting to meet you in person! I love your work too, and the fact that we are both art people, nature people, and ekphrastic poem writers. Thank you so much for your attention and care!

Ok so to answer your question: I have always been somewhat of an explorer; I went 3,000 miles away from home for undergrad initially (although I ended up graduating from a school on the east coast– [I’m from NYC]). It was like as soon as I turned eighteen, I was like, “I’m out to explore the world, peace y’all!” So, travel is something I have always been passionate about. I love seeing new places, experiencing new people, tasting new cultures, and just resetting my brain and perspective. I sometimes think my natural home is an airport.

And visual art: so, museums and street art and movies and just all forms of appreciating and taking in visual stimulation is also something I’m passionate about.

The third thing I’ll say is that as a Taurus (yes I will be mentioning astrology in this interview more than once but I’m not listing it as an interest as I think it’s just science at this point), I absolutely love being out in nature. I'm happiest on a walk in the woods so I make it a point to discover new nature trails wherever I am. I’m a wood sprite.

LV: Oh, I love this list! I can see the ways these things especially astrology appear in your books.

In the notes for Bloodletting you write, “Turns out this book is the end of a trilogy. It’s astonishing how much poetry gives and takes without us even knowing, but this is indeed the end of a story.” At what point did you realize your first book, Running to Stand Still, and your second book, vanishing point., were part of a trilogy ending with Bloodletting? How do you envision the narrative or lyric arc of these books when read together?

KR: Synergy. I’ve exhausted this part of my narrative, and I knew it as soon as I saved the last version of this latest manuscript. I’ve said all I needed to say about this aspect of my journey and the threads that run through the books, that I didn’t plan beforehand, are uncanny. I also believe my ancestors speak through me, so I also had a little help.

Each book came from a very honest and raw and real perspective when I’m writing, and my narrative grew and changed as my life changed, and my perspective evolved. Bloodletting is very topical and very much concerns itself with current events, but I was floored with all the ways that I was unexpectedly referencing and closing doors from my first two books while talking about very specific, very disparate, recent events. The narrative insisted on wrapping itself up, I just facilitated.

LV: Ever since I read Running to Stand Still, I’ve thought of you as one of our best pop culture critics. In addition to being a poet, you’re an essayist and were a music journalist. What came first for you, writing poetry, essays, or pop culture criticism?

KR: Oh, pop culture criticism. I was a music journalist and then a content writer for like a decade in NYC before I went back to graduate school and stayed there. As a first-generation college student and as a child of parents who weren't in academia or the arts, I had no idea that a job in academia or poetry was even an option for me coming out of grade school and undergrad. But my parents and teachers (who paid attention) knew I was a good writer, so I let my love of music and lyric lead me to my first poets (Neil Finn, Morrissey, Bono, Sinead O’ Connor…) and my first fortuitous career.

I’ve always been an essayist as I grew my teeth as a nonfiction writer, and I just love the expansiveness of essays. The title poem in this book plays with the braided essay format and a lot of the tools I’d use for that genre, so I don’t know if it’s possible to totally, cleanly switch between genres when writing, I just use the tools I have.

LV: It seems to me that you have a well stocked toolkit!

One of my favorite things about your work is how richly layered it is in content (lots of subtext!) but also in its formal choices like typographical elements such as crossed out words, grayed words, parentheticals, and so much more; upon each read there’s something for me to think about closer. Your ingenious formal choices make the writing feel even more alive and active. There’s also a sense of polyvocality through your use of quotes from various sources. Do you hold on to quotes to use later or are the quotes the impetus for creating poems? What does your writing process look like?

KR: Thank you for this acknowledgement and I would say it has a lot to do with the fact that I write in multiple genres, but beyond that, I learned poetry through music so I inherently think of poetry as multi-modal and something that is meant to jump off the page (especially since poetry wasn’t initially confined to the page—in any culture). I’m a nerd so I appreciate all that the formal choices that the page can offer, but I also like testing its limits.

I do keep quotes in my Notes app, but my Notes app is such a mess that they often stay buried so it’s a lot of happenstances (or divine intervention? or a seriously powerful subconscious? or maybe both things are true?) in terms of which quotes call back to me at what time. Again, I let the work work through me. I just follow my writerly instincts and my gut instincts in terms of what needs to be said when and how.

LV: In the titular poem, “Bloodletting,” you balance a range of topics including Bono’s reaction(s) to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, an examination of the speaker’s relationships with their brother and father, and an incisive critique of virtue signaling, celebrity idols, and racism, as well as a critical unpacking of all the drama that went down with Travis Kelce, Kayla Nicole, Taylor Swift, Matt Healey. I don’t think I’ve even covered everything that exists in that poem, which makes it more potent and impressive. If for the sake of those reading this interview, I had to reduce it down to its core then perhaps I’d say it’s an examination of how race and racialization inform worthiness and how it plays a role in who receives public sympathy/empathy. Maybe this is like asking a magician how they do their trick, but how do you do it? What advice would you give someone trying to weave a poem made of many threads?

KR: At the end of the day that poem is about who receives… but maybe more importantly who is truly OFFERED LOVE (and yes empathy and sympathy are offshoots of that) and who knows how to receive it and not just scraps or glimpses of it in this lifetime. This is a quality-of-life issue society don’t really address. I’m a double earth sign (Taurus sun/ Cap rising!) and I absolutely love competition and love feeling like I’ve worked for and earned something, so nothing gets my goat more than systems and games that are rigged, making “merit” and, in this case, true “desirability” impossible. Like what are we even doing? Don’t piss me off and don’t waste my time and don’t tell me I should settle for what’s not right just to have something or someone to post online (this book very much examines our relationship with social media). And yes, modern dating is a nightmare for everyone, but the settling (mostly) required of Black women (especially those of us who have had our confidence destroyed by growing up in mostly non-Black and Afro-Latin environments because our parents thought that’d be the best way for us to make something of ourselves) is always SO MUCH more severe than what is demanded of our non-Black counterparts. I can only speak to my experience at the end of the day, but I don’t think that I have anything close to a unique one, or one that’s not worth writing about.

If you tell me to suit up for battle and to enter the Arena–I’m always ready, but to show up and realize there’s no actual fight and no real battle as the outcomes have mostly been decided before I even showed up, yeah I’m angry. I’ve always been angry (as that’s what depression and anxiety often mask), and this book is an unearthing of that anger as the current state of world, and my patience for it, insisted I confront things head on.

Again, this is a quality-of-life issue that often gets erased as innocent "preferences" and people just loving who they love instead of the systematic misogynoir and the potential erasure of people and a culture (as women always hold the keys to every and all culture) that it is.

Whew. Ok. Next– I don’t know what to say generally for someone attempting to write a long poem besides to stay true to what they mean to say and to stay true to how they best know to say it. Not every book needs three sestinas and a villanelle for effect, just focus on the poems and the overall narrative arc– and the natural form(s) will emerge.

LV: I really appreciate hearing your thoughts on that poem and the larger issue(s) it addresses. Your advice for writing the long poem is affirming. I think folks struggle to let "the natural form(s)" emerge.

In thinking more about your craft, early in “Fratricide” there’s a moment of concession where you write “that’s another poem…” which made me wonder how you decide what a poem can and cannot hold. Your writing is beautifully capacious and often melds together multitudes of topics locating the connections between them. At what point do you decide what a poem can house? Do you find that you write then revise out pieces that can be used in other poems? Or do certain poems already exist and the poems you’re writing are a continuation at a different angle?

KR: My god I love all these questions. I think Bloodletting, the book, is one long poem, so deciding what to talk about and in what order and in what way was very important. I usually spend most of my time on editing and rearranging when writing a book, but that was more so the case with Bloodletting. This was my first book-length poem, so I was VERY clear on what needed to be said, the words just flowed whether I liked it or not, but the order and style was the real work of this project. And then of course the soundtrack that comes with it. It was a labor of “love” to be sure.

As for the withholding and offering up of information per poem, that made more sense to me during the editing, when I could see the poem as whole and how the individual pieces interacted with each other.

LV: Bloodletting is full of poems with language and typography that interject within the poems themselves. I’m very curious about the five “Interjections…” spread through the book. The one that struck me on first read and continues to reverberate in my brain is: “The water in blood evaporates until there’s just red / crust.” What was the thought process or poetic impulse with including these interjections in the structure of the book?

KR: I’m a Gemini moon so you could not even imagine the speed at which I navigate information and multiple ideas and threads at once in my head. There’s always “weather” up there, and it can be overwhelming if I don’t occasionally trap a thought and sit with or wrestle with it until it reveals its purpose. I think my poetry is loyal to that thought process as I try to dissect my thesis on the page, in real time. I attempt to show readers the conscious and subconscious themes that inspire the book as faithfully as I can. The interjections are just that– themes I’ve wrestled down.

The interjection you mentioned is about a wound. This entire book is about closing the wounds of my love journey, but also ripping the scab off first. All the three books are about the same thing at the end of the day, finding love and recognition and all the obstacles that stand in the way of that– circumstances (I’m in part arguing) were decided before I even had a say so.

LV: I totally get that as a Gemini, but even still I am in awe! What are you working on now? I believe I saw that you’ll have a new book called Nebraska out in 2028?

KR: Yes, this is correct. It’s a book (loosely) about Charles Starkweather who went on a murder spree that changed how this country ingests “True Crime.” He was from Lincoln and was executed in a prison that was like a mile away from where I lived in Lincoln while working on my PhD. I also remember watching a made-for-TV movie about him as a teen starring Tim Roth and I was fascinated by his and Caril Anne Fugate’s story. I’m using him as a vehicle to explore my experiences with Nebraska, Middle America, and the evil and depravity that lurks in this country… that might be the heart of this country (?), as I’ve now lived in and didn’t exactly love “The Heartland.” Of course, music led me to him too—Springsteen’s Nebraska is about him. Funny how everything keeps coming full circle when you're really paying attention.

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Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, pop culture critic, film scholar, and the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Bloodletting, vanishing point., and Running to Stand Still. Her debut book of essays, Life During Wartime, won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work has been published widely, in outlets including The Atlantic, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, ESPN the Magazine, Film Ireland, The Best American Poetry Blog, Poetry Review, and American Poets Magazine. An active Fulbright scholar, Kimberly holds advanced degrees from University College Cork, San Francisco State University, The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Columbia University. Dr. Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami. 

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI, among others.