The Black Reeds takes up poetry as an intersection of the history of the individual with a history and geography of migrations understood in multiple senses, as the movement of lyric poetry through the changing syntax, rhythms, inflections, and vocabulary of English, as the movement of peoples both actual and imagined across territory and in time, and as the movement of readers among the expeditions of a book into experimental and unfamiliar terrain. The metaphor that might say something about the form of the book is that of a funnel made out of time and passing through the events that it temporarily brings into strange association. The meaning of black, as a color that is not white and as a political category with its furious torment, wavers between the reeds and syllables of this funnel, as both desire and predicament.