At its best Dark Days is the record of an intellectual life sustained by the Black vernacular ... In Reeves’s hands profligacy becomes an ethical necessity: Everything must be thought of in relation to what it shares space with ... His gleefully erudite rhetoric operates with the imprecision of simile, downplaying difference in favor of a solidarity that one senses Reeves wants very badly to exist in this world ... Dark Days stumbles on that undertone of coercion, as Reeves repeatedly tries to map art and politics into a much-too-easy relation.
The most subversive material in Dark Days involves intimacy, which has long been what oppressors fear the most ... Reeves leaves us to confront the insufficiency of narrative.
