Robin Coste Lewis takes back depictions of the black feminine and refuses to land or hold down that which has always been alive and loving and lovely. This title poem upends the language of representation, collected from the cataloging of the black body in Western art. Tender and masterful opening and closing poems bookend the archival, lyric masterwork, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," at the center of the collection.
"Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems reframes the black figure, most specifically the black female, by pointing out the borders of black beauty, black happiness, and black resilience in our canonical visual culture. Lewis's first collection, a detailed tapestry of ancient and modern behavior-names, dates, and emotional marginalia-is one of a kind." -Yusef Komunyakaa
The body is at the center of this imagistic inquiry, and each line is a blind stitch in the psychological metrics of the whole. These poignant poems, through a poetic excavation, unearth figures that make us question racial constructs. She shows how cultures traverse terrains and comingle. "Robin Coste Lewis's Voyage of the Sable Venus is an experimental tribute to a human history that embraces truth and adventure. In providing us with a revelatory gloss on centuries of art, Robin Coste Lewis has made us aware of the enormity of the change reflected and perhaps partly brought about by contemporary black women artists whose vision, originality, and humor offer a heartening corrective to the ghastly insult of the Sable Venus." -Francine Prose, New York Review of Books Among the virtues of the collection is the intensity of Lewis's faith in the power of language and image to tell us things that are true, but that are rarely said, about history, race, gender, power, the body, scholarship, and visual representation.
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