"Bloodletting explores and articulates a distillation of pop culture and violence both global and localized across sharp lyric, writing counterpoints and contradictions across the present moment of the American landscape—Taylor Swift and the devastation of Gaza, TikTok videos, femicide and the male gaze, Golems and smartphones—somehow all provided equal weight through mainstream culture. . . . Offering sharp observation and distillation, Reyes asks the reader to question what stories get told and by whom, and what might this end up doing to our attention. . . . This is a complex, devastating and propulsive collection of poems fully able to simultaneously live within and respond to the present moment, in remarkable ways. She cuts through the noise, the bluster, and gets to the heart of it, providing clarity and clear resistance."

rob mclennan’s blog

"There is, in Reyes' Bloodletting, an impressive command of diction that, coupled with her precision for clarity, wit and intense observation, produces a poetry of great insight and intellectual alacrity that makes her a brilliant observer of the complexities of the American present. Whether writing about Taylor Swift, the crisis of global warming, or her father, her capacious sensibility allows for vulnerability, humor and the luminous red of bold cultural commentary. Her poems are beautiful studies in form and sentiment. Reyes' poems have managed the enviable quality of being wholly contemporary and present and at the same time unfettered by time."

Kwame Dawes, author of "Sturge Town"

"In Bloodletting, Reyes strips herself bare and asks the same of her readers. 'Discomfort is no longer a season,' she writes, and in that discernment, we are given permission to not only feel, but allow rage to boil over and set us free. Reyes' poems are so precise, the blade of a knife, carving out the hidden uglies of this world. Full of pop culture references, and the language of the living, this collection dares us to texture everything until we finally find its true center: 'I have no idea what to live for if not love,' we read & poof this collection becomes an act of deep knowing, purposeful, in a world burning too hot for our comfort."
 

Yesenia Montilla, author of "The Pink Box" and "Muse Found in a Colonized Body"

"The unfolding honesty of Bloodletting, its cut, just deep enough, feels like a record of a present that might break us. Reyes answers the gaslighting of an entire society with a poet's truth, as she mourns her and our illusions."

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of "antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano" and "lo terciario/ the tertiary"