At its best “Dark Days” is the record of an intellectual life sustained by the Black vernacular. In the essay “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars,” Reeves recounts learning how to be a critic in the Pentecostal church. “Profligacy” is the key word here: With a nod to Hartman’s explorations of “wayward” lives and the presumed promiscuity of Black urban culture, Reeves reframes promiscuity as an aesthetic and intellectual virtue. In Reeves’s hands profligacy becomes an ethical necessity: Everything must be thought of in relation to what it shares space with. Recounting a trip to speak with students at a Native school, he feels his status as a stranger among strangers.

---

Persons: ” Reeves, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Louis Till, Emmett Till’s, Ezra Pound, Mussolini, Hitler, Virgil, Dante, Reeves, Michael K, Williams, Solmaz, profligacy, ” Locations: ”