robin coste lewis voyage of the sable venus

What does violence look like in this cage that is history? What does it mean to find pleasure with trauma inscribed on the body and the land? What is want here? What is beauty?Ĭentering black women, Voyage catalogs the creative life force that has always existed within and outside of violent histories of colonial conquest. To keep you happy, I decorated the bars.” Immediately, we are thrust into an arena of racialized violence and desire-the “I” and “you” in a dynamic aftermath that has accrued wide-flung historical refuse: “There were fingers on the floor / and the split bodies of women // who’ d been torn apart by horses / during the Inquisition.” But the cage is not all horror-“We had books and a waterfall // was falling in the corner”-and desire entangles repulsion and attraction.

“Plantation” opens the collection: “And then one morning we woke up / embracing on the bare floor of a large cage.

Voyage of The Sable Venus, in three sections, takes stock of systems of capture and containment from the Middle Passage to British imperialism in South Asia, and probes the matrix of representational conundrums left in their wake. The photograph says something about capitalism, but it says even more about dreaming. We are left only with the woman herself-her posture a gesture toward her vast dreams and desires, which we may behold but cannot fully know. If an object in the store catalyzed her imagination, its identity eludes the camera’s capture. Standing on a populated Mississippi sidewalk in the 1930s, she nonetheless seems shrouded in something private, entirely of her own making. The title is “Window Shopping,” but we can’t see the objects encased in glass-only a slim, sundressed black woman facing the display, one hand on her hip and the other on her chin. The cover of Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis’ stunning debut poetry collection-which won the 2015 National Book Award-features an elegant sepia photograph by Eudora Welty. There are a host of poetry collections that challenge that old adage-don’t judge a book by its cover: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2015), and Nate Marshall’s Wild Hundreds (2015) are but a few recent releases that are as gorgeous as objects as they are powerful in language.

Robin coste lewis voyage of the sable venus