Robin Coste Lewis - a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present

Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems,  Knopf, 2015.


A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice. 
Robin Coste Lewis’s electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis’s autobiographical poems, “Voyage” is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, as it juxtaposes our names for things with what we actually see and know. Offering a new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role has art played in this ancient, often heinous story? From the “Young Black Female Carrying / a Perfume Vase” to a “Little Brown Girl / Girl Standing in a Tree / First Day of Voluntary / School Integration,” this poet adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire and how they define us all, including herself, as she explores her own sometimes painful history. Lewis’s book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.




“Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus is an experimental tribute to a human history that embraces truth and adventure. She shows how cultures traverse terrains and comingle. These poignant poems, through a poetic excavation, unearth figures that make us question racial constructs. The body is at the center of this imagistic inquiry, and each line is a blind stitch in the psychological metrics of the whole. Lewis’s first collection, a detailed tapestry of ancient and modern behavior—names, dates, and emotional marginalia—is one of a kind.”––Yusef Komunyakaa

"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. Tender and masterful opening and closing poems bookend the archival, lyric masterwork, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," at the center of the collection. This title poem upends the language of representation, collected from the cataloging of the black body in Western art. 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. Altogether new, open, experimental and ground-breaking, Lewis privileges real life in all its complications, surprises and triumphs over the frames that have locked down the scale of black womanhood.”––Claudia Rankine




When Robin Coste Lewis was writing “Voyage of the Sable Venus”—the core, the poem at the heart of her book Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems—on Wednesday nights she would bring a new section to the table on West Tenth Street, at NYU’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, and, when it was her turn among the twelve poets in the workshop, she would hold the pile of copies of the draft and first read it to us, then pass it to the poet next to her, who would read it to us and to Robin, then the copies would come around the table and we would see it. It was a new sun, rising—and facing, across the sky, a new full moon, a mirror. In these brilliant, terrifying, gorgeous, essential poems, our species is seeing itself as if for the first time—for one of the first times which art, over the years, gives us, the times which make up the story of human seeing, knowing, and slowly transforming. Then we would speak, greet the new being—and then in turn Robin would hear, and respond to, in her generous, smart, deep, warm way, her poem’s fellow and fellow poems brought to the table that day. —Sharon Olds




Robin Coste Lewis’s début poetry collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems” (Knopf), derives its title from a notorious eighteenth-century engraving by Thomas Stothard, “The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies.” The image was slave-trade propaganda: it shows an African woman posed like Botticelli’s Venus on a weirdly upholstered half shell. She glides serenely across the Middle Passage, attended by an entourage of cherubs and dolphins and escorted by a predatory Triton, who looks as though he’d read the poem on which the engraving is based: Isaac Teale’s “The Sable Venus, An Ode,” which celebrates the pleasures of raping slave women, since black and white—Sable Venus and Botticelli’s Venus—are, after all, the same “at night.”

“The Voyage of the Sable Venus” has made its own voyage—that word’s bitter irony, lost on its original audience, is now its meaning—and ended up in this arresting book, whose title subtly transforms it. Titles establish property; change the title, and you’ve wrested from the history of racism a powerful symbol for the emergence of black women as the depictors of their own lives. But a voyage requires both an origin and a destination, and so the eighteenth-century engraving and the twenty-first-century book operate as two shores in a trip from the lurid past, in which African women were transported to be sold into slavery as property, to the current day, when an African-American woman like Lewis can recast history in her own brilliant, troubling terms. Google the phrase “voyage of the sable venus,” and you will see how these two works are now linked, in both the old and the new senses of that word.

Lewis’s volume, nominated for a National Book Award, takes its place in a line of important reclamations of “Venus” from its use as a humiliating designation for black women and for depictions of them, including Rita Dove’s “The Venus of Willendorf” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Venus Hottentot.” (You could argue that Venus Williams, perhaps the most famous Venus since the Roman goddess, has, with tennis as her medium, made her own aesthetic intervention.) Poems can provide the effaced interiority of these caricatures, but the backlog of silenced persons is daunting and the history by no means safely concluded. And so Lewis’s book begins with an aftermath, a morning-after poem, “Plantation,” in which two lovers awake “embracing on the bare floor of a large cage,” bound together by an intimacy that is concomitant with confided, and temporarily pardoned, shames:

To keep you happy, I decorated the bars.
Because you had never been hungry, I knew
 
I could tell you the black side
of my family owned slaves.
 
I realize this is perhaps
the one reason why I love you,
 
because I told you this
and you—still—wanted to kiss
 
me. We laughed when I said plantation,
fell into our chairs when I said cane.

Those “bars,” reflected in the couplets on the page, stand for the innate possessiveness of our gaze; the “you” whose happiness depends on the cage being made pretty is, partly, the reader, who is lured by beauty to the site of pain, and whose scrutinizing presence there turns a bedroom into a prison, or perhaps a zoo. Sex, far from being a reprieve from the humiliations of the past, expresses them; it promises to soar above social and historical identity, but it’s more like an early Wright brothers plane, skipping and wobbling from one degradation to the next: the lover who laughs one minute, changes “every now and then” from “a prancing black buck”—the white stereotype for black male sexual threat—to a “small high yellow girl: pigtailed, / patent leather, eyes spinning gossamer, begging / for egg salad and banana pudding.” Experience and innocence, the “black buck” and the light-skinned girl, are elements of a single racist trope, whose tensions well up in every act of tenderness:

And then you were fourteen, and you had grown
a glorious steel cock under your skirt. To brag
 
you rubbed yourself against me. Then your tongue
was inside my mouth, and I wanted to say
 
Please ask me first, but it was your
tongue, so who cared suddenly
 
about your poor manners?

The poem gets progressively more nightmarish: the “tongue . . . inside my mouth” is an image for speech and for its effacement under circumstances that here seem ecstatic, there violent. Are these lovers, or successive versions of a single person, her sexuality tainted by history? By the end of the poem, both parties have suffered a grotesque, Ovidian transformation: “You said, The bars look pretty, Baby, / then rubbed your hind legs up against mine.”

Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California with a fellowship in Poetry and Visual Studies, and those disciplines join together in her book’s title poem—seventy-nine pages long, including notes and appendices—which is itself made up entirely of the “titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions” of objects in Western art that depict the black female form, going back to 38,000 B.C. The sheer bulk of material that Lewis turned up in her research, and the relentlessness of the descriptions, suggests that the history of the black female body is inextricable from the institutions that claim ownership of its depictions; the subjugation is translated into symbolic terms but never undone. Two haunting epigraphs hang over the poem: an announcement, from 1939, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Employees’ Association Minstrel Show and Dance,” and an inquiry by one “Mrs. B. L. Blankenship,” who writes that she is “anxious to buy a small healthy negro girl—ten or twelve years old.” The latter confronts us with the outright barbarism of slavery and its attendant transactions, while the former suggests how thin a disguise racism must wear at any given moment, in any given cultural institution, to pass for what we optimistically call “culture.”

Poems describing works of art are nearly as old as poems and works of art. The name for this hoary genre is ekphrasis, though in Lewis’s hands its conventions are scrambled. The problem isn’t that the works of art are silent and need a voice; it’s that we encounter them inside institutions that title and describe them for us, pre-assigning them meaning. Poetry can’t imagine these artifacts from scratch, since their labels adhere so tenaciously to them. And so Lewis followed some stringent, self-imposed rules in composing this long poem, altering nothing about her source language except its punctuation. This puts extraordinary pressure on the fundamentals of prosody. Line breaks, stanza shapes, the management and distribution of words and silence—this small repertoire of formal options is here weaponized for maximum impact. The poem moves chronologically; this is a passage from one of its early sections, “Catalog I: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome”:

Statuette of a Woman Reduced
to the Shape of a Flat Paddle
 
Statuette of a Black Slave Girl
Right Half of Body and Head Missing
 
Head of a Young Black Woman Fragment
from a Statuette of a Black Dancing Girl

Lewis’s technique returns the humanity to these anonymous women, which, in turn, makes the objects depicting them feel like examples of, and even instruments of, real historical violence. In a gallery, it seems perfectly natural to see a woman missing her head and half of her body. Here, in a list that feels like a catalogue of atrocities, it’s nearly unbearable.

A later, formally inventive section divides women from the objects that embody them by a method of formal panning, where the residue of personhood is extracted and isolated on the page:

water jar
 
bowl
 
ointment spoon

in the form of swimming

black girl

 
mirror
with handle

in the form of a carved standing

black girl

Since form is essentially neutral, its effects are wildly variable; in some instances, the technique redeems the women, who were literally objectified, but only, after all, by objectifying them in a different form. Separated from their subjects, these objects that have taken the shape of black women become formless: the poem’s own form corrects the problem by building a sombre temporal interval between object and person, as our eyes make their own voyage from the left to the right margin.

First books usually spend longer in the chrysalis than later books, and often feel more like finish lines than like starting blocks: a writer never again gets so much time off the clock. “Voyage of the Sable Venus” was made over roughly forty thousand years, if we take seriously Lewis’s continuum of historical and autobiographical time. In its final sections, many of the art works listed are by black women, including a “Venus of Compton,” whose presence suggests not only the tennis star but also Lewis’s own birth in that city. The effect is magical, a little like Hermione’s abrupt transformation, at the end of “The Winter’s Tale,” from statue to living woman. All those women made into serviceable, mute paddles and spoons, missing their limbs and heads, are, by the miracle of verbal art, restored. This may be one reason the poem is dedicated to “the legacy of black librarianship, and black librarians, worldwide”; something of their oblique, channelled genius, expressed in the social space of the library as a “collection” of books by others—black and white, dead and living—is here transferred to the aesthetic space of Lewis’s own many-chambered and remarkable collection. - Dan Chiasson

On Wednesday night, the National Book Award for poetry went to Los Angeles poet Robin Coste Lewis for her Voyage of the Sable Venus. The award would be out of the ordinary if only because this is Lewis’s first book; the last time the poetry award went to a debut was Marilyn Hacker’s Presentation Piece, in 1974. But it’s all the more significant because it points to a sea change in American poetry, and the formation of new values both on and off the page.

Voyage of the Sable Venus is a massive work, and from its first page it declares itself as a powerful and era-defining poetic achievement. The collection is bookended by searing lyric poems that explore what it means to be a black woman today, in America and in the larger world. “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” toggles between the experience of motherhood and the uncanny memory of watching a water buffalo birth a stillborn calf at night in India, years earlier. “She must turn around and see / what has happened to her, or she will go mad,” Lewis writes. This imperative applies to the poet as well as the animal, and it runs through the entire collection. In poem after poem, Lewis’s vision is panoramic and historical, and nowhere is this more evident than in the title piece, which spans 79 pages at the heart of the book. She describes it as “a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” The piece is voluminous, often violent, and a sight to behold.

Taken in a broader context, Lewis’s work represents an important shift in how the mainstream literary world is considering the work of black poets. Her poems speak out of lived experience and a palpable, emotional I, but they are also ingeniously experimental, crafted using elaborate constraints and brilliant formal turns. It’s the kind of work that erases the line between confessional, identity-based poetry and conceptual poetry—a line that has been problematically racialized for far too long. With poets like Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place provoking recent controversies—and being appropriately criticized for them—the literary community at large is looking toward a more diverse set of poets who are intellectually rigorous, emotionally direct, and conscious of their ethics, all at the same time.

Fortunately, there are many poets working at that intersection right now. This year’s five finalists for the National Book Award included four writers of color, three of whom are black. (The 2014 finalists included two dazzling and innovative black poets, Fred Moten and Claudia Rankine. Many in the poetry world thought that Rankine’s Citizen, an explosive lyric study of verbal racism, had been snubbed when the award went to Louise Glück.) And each of these finalists writes in fascinating, innovative modes, at once accessible and challenging in both their aesthetics and their politics. The list of writers of color at the forefront of contemporary poetry is ever-growing—beyond U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, also of note are Eduardo C. Corral, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, Camille Rankine, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith, and Jenny Zhang—and increasingly their voices are recognized as deeply needed. With the increased exposure that the National Book Award will bring, it’s hopeful that Voyage of the Sable Venus will make still more readers aware of the new life that many writers of color are breathing into American poetry. - Jay Deshpande

The most immediate thing about Robin Coste Lewis’s debut poetry volume, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, is the gorgeous job Knopf has done producing its hardcover edition: the paper is thick and creamy, the volume is deckle-edged and fractionally oversized, and the dust jacket design by Stephanie Ross is eye-catchingly stately. For a general reading public more wary of contemporary poetry than any before it, such an alluring package will surely do good work to defuse that wariness and invite them in.

What they’ll find is a largely marvelous collection of meditations on race, gender, motherhood, and history. The book is divided into three sections: two sections of shorter poems bookending the central part of the work, a long piece named “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” in which Lewis collects “the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” The material choices Lewis makes in this long work are consistently fascinating in the way they flicker back and forth between humanity and crassness, and that carefully-calibrated oscillation between outrage and irony runs moves the whole book, from the anger and acid sarcasm of “From:/To:”:

At last, a dark murderous lunatic
to whom they are allowed to respond.
Here, no one expects them to be strung
up by their necks – dangled – and then left.
To be cut down from a tall tree – and not cry,
No law- here – will require them to watch
their families hurled on top of the world’s bright pyre,
over generations – without complaint –
unattended by rage’s holiness
or the clear mirror of grief. They find some
chalk to celebrate. While one loads, one lifts,
then checks. Just before they ignite the bomb,
they write on its shell – FROM HARLEM, TO HITLER –
then stand back for the camera, smiling.

 

To the more world-weary and dogged “Summer”:

 

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin
on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being
postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see
them, nor understand what I knew to be circling
inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son
to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled
a banana. And cursed God – His arrogance,
His gall – to still expect our devotion
after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed
my son the papery dead skins so he could
know, too, what it feels like when something shows up
at your door – twice – telling you what you already know.

There are some strained presentations, some clunky attempts at cheap moralizing, but the cumulative power of Lewis’s poetic vision is arresting. In the portion of “Frame” that recalls the textbook illustrations of her youth, for instance, the iconic photo taken immediately after Martin Luther King was shot figures in a cascade of conflicting images and one horribly final sound:

Our textbooks stuttered over the same four pictures every year: that girl
in the foreground, on the balcony: black loafers, white bobby socks, black skirt,
cardigan, white collar. Her hand pointing. The others – all men – looking
so smart, shirt-and-tied, like the gentle men on my street, pointing 

as well, toward the air –
the blank page, the well-worn hollow space –
from which the answer was always
that same hoary thud.

Voyage of the Sable Venus, this pitiless moral accounting wrapped in its pretty cover, is a finalist for the National Book Award and richly deserves to win it and the wider audience that comes with it. - Steve Donoghue

“All is suffering is a bad modernist translation,” Robin Coste Lewis explains. “What the Buddha really said is: It’s all a mixed bag. Shit / is complicated. Everything’s fucked up. Everything’s gorgeous.” This binding of seemingly opposing tethers as a means of considering life and all it entails is the most apt description of Lewis’s collection Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (Knopf). “Everything’s fucked up. Everything’s gorgeous” so neatly traces my pendulum-like emotional response to the poems in this collection. For while this book compellingly and terrifyingly documents the racist patriarchal systems, particularly intersectionality à la Kimberlé Crenshaw, in our modern society (and how those that go way—way—back), Lewis does so with a remarkable hopefulness, and in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse.

Voyage of the Sable Venus contains three parts. The second (titular) section is conceptual, using titles and/or descriptions of Western art objects that include the black female figure from 38,000 BCE to the present, in order to explore how these forms were “used” in art. Lewis provides a prologue to these poems, laying out her constraints and (with a light touch) her discoveries, including “because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs.” Thus making, at least this reader, consider the “work” the black female figure was forced to do not just in the physical realm, the canvas, or in sculpture, but in the quotidian domestic tool—she held belts together, she combed hair. Another discovery was many curators’ decision to remove titles “such as slave, colored, and Negro…and replace these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African-American.” Lewis unsanitizes them for us to show the dirty truth. In addition to using titles of works by oppressors, Lewis smartly includes works by black women and/or queer artists, allowing space for those voices as well. With that, we move through time and space via these artworks, and thus the many horrifying tropes the black female body has been ascribed through the ages. This includes the body in pieces (“Heads and Busts / Headless-Footless-Armless”) while also sexualized (“But with a Strong / Incised Vaginal // Opening”). We read the physically harmed body, the bound body, the body carrying bounty/goods such as fruit, the lies about happy black/white relations. In each Lewis often jams titles/descriptions up against one another and—though the titles remain unchanged—gives us new narratives and turns with alterations to punctuation and space. “Isis” and “Aphrodite” become “I Sis Aphro / Dite.” Or, to powerfully change (yet simultaneously point to) the terrible reality: “Negro man strapped to a ladder, Being. / Lashed.”

All of this circles around what Lewis pins down here:

Damaged Black Woman
Standing on Tiptoe
on One End of a Seesaw
While a Caricatured Figure Jumps
on the Other
End

If one attempts to balance on one side of a fulcrum, she stands no chance with such a weight working against her. This isn’t a slow tipping of the scales – this is an inevitable defeat, tossing her through the air.

Near the end of the “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Lewis (via titles) writes:

I send you these few lines in order
To bring you up
On what has been
Happening to me.
—Venus of Compton

This middle section clocks in at nearly eight pages which, by publishing standards, is a full book. Yet it is clear that, while the long poem “Voyage of the Sable Venus” is instrumental in gaining understanding about “what has been // Happening” to Lewis (a woman from Compton), this history, alone, is only a partial picture. Lewis’s inclusion of sections comprised almost entirely of lyrical first-person poetry surrounding “Voyage of the Sable Venus” is not a merely forcing together of her most recent best work. With the first and final sections she pushes back the edges of the frame, showing us her life, not just what informed it through history.

As with “Voyage,” though with more intensity, the first and third sections of the book bear a quiet yet firm and forceful tone—the effect one feels when she is in the presence of someone so quiet, all around them must lean in to hear. The first poem, “Plantation” is linked with a bright thread to the last in the collection: “Félicité.” In both, Lewis attempts to reckon with the fact that “the black side of my family owned slaves.” “Plantation” tells of a doomed relationship with a shape-shifting beloved who, while aggressive, doesn’t judge the speaker for this complicated fact, allowing for a tenderness. “Félicité” is more specific, with Lewis’s method of gaining the undisputable knowledge (via archive) that a woman relative generations back was a slave and, once a free woman, became a slave owner herself. We see her white lover, consider her strolling across her county-sized property. Where most would invert these pieces—give the portrait of that ancestor and the explicit trouble of her legacy first—Lewis expertly inverts, instead having the details initially hinted at surface later for her reader, allowing for a more nuanced payoff.

These sections contain so much—elements of a rich and complicated life, thus far. This includes meditations on The Wiz, a childhood in Compton with deep color divides, surviving molestation, mother buying a copy of Famous Afro-Americans, “So that I could see a photograph of an uncommon colored body— / besides a burnt body, or a bent body, or a bleeding body, or the murdered body” (or MLK Jr.), experiences with her own young son in the near-present. This all has a power that is intensified by that which surrounds it. Thus I cannot-not write about the second poem in this book—“On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari.” It is a long poem, almost ten pages, employing William Carlos Williams’ triadic stair-step line extended to quatrains. It is the kind of poem we rarely see now. It is a masterpiece, but quiet—building, weaving, looping back, all telling of a day’s experience in India. There is the story of the goddess Parvati’s burnt body parts strewn across mountains and the speaker visiting one such holy landing site. On the way back, a water buffalo is giving birth in the road, stalling the speaker’s return. The herders force the would-be mother to see and note the dead calf after its birth, explaining, “She must turn around and see / what has happened to her or she will go mad.” This all reappears to the speaker when she is leaving home with her own newborn years later. Suddenly she is Parvati’s charred and scattered self, she is the water buffalo—

I have to go back

to that wet black thing

dead in the road. I have to turn around.

I must put my face in it.

This book is a clear turning back, a consideration of what Lewis most wants to leave behind and forget—the tragedies and horrors that seem to provide nothing but grief, but require examination to avoid insanity from lack of deep understanding of what has traumatized you. This is also clearly a poem regarding literal serious physical injury of some kind, (“Somehow, I am still alive”; “The more I recover, the more I go / blind”). While that recurring thread is a faint one, considering the length of the poem, Lewis weaves it adeptly. She is most explicit near the end of the piece when connecting herself directly to Parvati:

For years, my whole body ran

away from me. When I flew—charred—

through the air, my ankles and toes fell off

onto the peaks of impassable mountains.

As Parvati had to undergo the trial of fire to prove her purity for Shiva, this begs the question: what trials are required for recognition? When is the suffering one has endured enough?

On the dedication page of Voyage of the Sable Venus it states, “for beauty.” Considering Elaine Scarry’s flawed argument (among many) in On Beauty and Being Just about a beautiful object, “Noticing its beauty increases the possibility that it will be carefully handled,” Lewis illustrates that it isn’t so simple—and rarely true. As Lewis’s Buddha states, “It’s a mixed bag.” Voyage demonstrates the elements that formulate an identity, inform a life. There is the personal—the “I” as an agent, a witness, a mind and body present. There is also the historical—all the shit that precedes one’s birth that has an impact, now, even when it traces back to antiquity. Lewis asks, “What can History possibly say?” Everything and nothing, it seems. Yet “This is my life,” Lewis writes (via artworks),

cutting up
old film. Don’t edit
the wrong thing out

Derrida explains that “Memory is not just the opposite of forgetting.” And Lewis has shown that to be the case, though hardly in a fatalistic sense. She sees and considers—but cuts, too. - Diana Arterian

In the notes to the title poem of Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, Robin Coste Lewis speaks through an epigraph from Gwendolyn Brooks: “Art hurts. Art urges voyages—”, and while both of the notions are reasons why many of us go to poetry as readers and writers, Lewis’ collection sets new standards in magnitude and scale. But, Lewis is a writer aware of what both of these properties of poetry can do; for pain, her boundary is “catharsis” and for a voyage, the boundaries are those of language and history. As for the cathartic, in a recent interview with the PEN American Center, she remarks that its usefulness is, itself, limited—speaking on one of the poems in the book, “Lure,” she accepts catharsis

[a]s a tool, sure, but as a goal I remain suspicious. So what if we all cry. Who cares…Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against crying. I hope my work allows the reader to access sensations that have been locked away or ill-considered. But when we make that the sole mark or goal…we miss out on poetry’s deeper properties, which can take us far beyond emotional release.

If pain is enacted or described by language and recorded in history by language, neither is mutually exclusive; each of these holds the almost certain potential of begetting the other. Lewis’ work presents, explores, and disproves any false dichotomy that might still separate the two. The goal of her work is not, then, merely cathartic—it sets us on the various journeys present in the Voyage of the Sable Venus which aim to transform, translate, and orient the reader simply by handing them a map of history and experience saying “Go. Now.” and sending them toward an uncertain territory whose boundaries are imperceptible and variable. As Lewis writes in “Pleasure & Understanding,”

All is suffering is a bad modernist translation.
What the Buddha really said is: It’s all a mixed bag. Shit
is complicated. Everything is fucked up. Everything is gorgeous.

One of the focal points for many who read the book is the second part of the three-part text—the title poem “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” a 79-page long poem in sections composed of a mix of titles of artwork and gallery/collection notes about collected and selected art objects. Lewis lets the reader in on the seven major restrictions in both sourcing and usage which she allowed herself in the composition process such as reinscribing (in Lewis’ words “re-erasing”) the titles to undo linguistic sanitization, not allowing titles to be separated (except in lineation), or giving herself the ability to remove and insert punctuation. These rules seem to enact conceptualist thought rather than merely presenting themselves as enabling constraints, and many have commented this poem endows the manuscript with a sense of the Conceptual. It immediately resonates with work like that of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! or projects by fellow Los Angeles poet Doug Kearney.

But, like those poets, the resulting poem is a surprising work of juxtaposition, fragmented ekphrasis, and archival narrative. Lewis creates arrangements of art objects that are not practically possible, and could not come together outside of her text. Each of the cited titles are evocations of an art that is also nearly completely imaginary; without intimately knowing each work, it is impossible to picture them, and so the titles stand in as a kind of condensed ekphrastic statement on their own, many of them describing action taking place in an unperceivable medium. As such, the reader is put in a liminal position in which the only choice is to watch the titles as they are placed on the field (or “screen” to adapt the continuous present metaphor of film) for limited durations, in a set order, accomplishing the creation of a narrative. And from the myriad of titles used to construct the piece, the narrative begins to emerge across the various “Catalogues” that provide progression in time. In the fourth section of the poem entitled “Medieval Colonial,” Lewis provides narration of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage through the use of the etching from which the book derives its title,

Foreground-Slave.
Ship in Middle

Distance: a Black Woman Kneeling
in a Storm, Her Hands Clasped.

in Prayer and her Eyes
Cast Upward.

Nude Black Woman
in an Oyster Shell

Drawn by Dolphins
through the Water

and accompanied by Cupids,
Neptune, and Others.

While sections shift between formic structures that emphasize listing versus other more common stanzaic formats, the sense of story is never lost. Even though it is one of which readers, to varying degrees, have awareness, Lewis’ telling of it is both distanced and intimate as these art objects are of our collective American history, and demonstrate, without mitigation, how artists pictured both their pictorial subjects and themselves.

The section uses the way that artists and painters used their own mythologies as a means of crafting a moment of fantastical appropriation, the placing of bodies in both position and space, and within Western mythological traditions that enforce various levels of prescription and description. Lewis’ ability to create a nonlinear telling of linear history within the space of only a few stanzas of titles is beautiful, disheartening, surreal, and despairing all at once. This sense is heightened by the broad inclusion of both black and white artists (though the reader never definitively knows which title are attributed to which artists), and even though the reader is not necessarily able to call to mind the exact pictures which Lewis incorporates, it is nonetheless clear what is being depicted.

And though the second section of the book is as massive a success as it is, Lewis’ work in the two lyric sections that begin and end Voyage of the Sable Venus are no less fantastic, jarring, and powerful. To a certain extent, they carry on the work of the title poem in how, for the first time, a poetry book reads as if it were a real conversation with other artists and poetic tradition. This review’s early comparisons to M. NourbeSe Philip and Douglas Kearney give some of the contemporary poets to which this work speaks, but it is reminiscent of the work of Harryette Mullen at times, and at others Gwendolyn Brooks (independent of her use in epigraph), not to mention many, many others to which Lewis adds her own register.

Lewis grapples with history inasmuch as she works with poetic voice and form, placing the book in as natural a position as any that I’ve read in recent years. In poems such as “The Wilde Women of Aiken,” Lewis seems to speak to the historical in lines that demonstrate stark defiance such as its closing in which Lewis’ speaker claims “[y]ou/cannot/prevent me,” as if to telegraph the triple-transgressive quality of the act and fact of being in addition to the speaker’s assertion of the fact, in either speech or writing.

Voyage of the Sable Venus is at once ironic, grave, angry, honest, deceptive, hopeful, despondent, and distressed—an accurate picture of what Lewis translates the Buddha to have meant with the improper translation of “all is suffering.” But Lewis’ take on the subjects of race, history, and the appropriations enacted upon them is clear, even if ultimately undecided, erring on the side of some glimmer of hope as to what the complex and fraught history of the black female body implies for the future. As “Félicité,” the closing poem of the book, contends, Lewis’ own family history is complicated by a resistance to “not to say these words: /The black side of my family/owned slaves,” in reference to the title figure whose sister Françoise, the subject of an indeterminate history, “is the only one/who can still cross the River,//the only one still flying/backwards, over the Gulf/without landing.” - Douglas Luman

One of the poems in Robin Coste Lewis’s first book, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” has a title that resembles a gift label:

“From:
To:”

Beneath is a poem about an all-black military unit, probably the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, which fought in the European theater during World War II. “From Harlem, To Hitler,” this unit’s soldiers (and the ones in the poem) chalked on outgoing shells. About that target, Ms. Lewis observes: “At last, a dark murderous lunatic/to whom they are allowed to respond.”

“Voyage of the Sable Venus,” for which Ms. Lewis recently won a National Book Award, is a taut book of responses to lunatic cultural ideas of many sorts. Its thrilling centerpiece is its 79-page title poem, consists almost entirely of the titles of Western artworks, spread over some 40,000 years, which comment on the black female figure.

Ms. Lewis is shrewd enough to begin this long poem with the text of an actual invitation. In this case, it is to a minstrel show and dance, held for Metropolitan Museum of Art employees on Oct. 17, 1936. She is witty enough, in a bruising manner, to offer musical cues. An epigraph to one of this poem’s sections is from Lou Reed: “And the colored girls go ‘Doot, doo-doot, doo-doot, doo-doo-doot. … ’”

The actual poem scatters broken cultural crockery in many directions, but has the dry and thus spooky reserve of catalog copy. A snippet of this poem reads:

Standing Female Reliquary Figure
with Crested Coiffure and Hands

Clasped in Front of Torso, Holding
a staff Surmounted by a Human Head

Figure Has Prominent
Vagina Bended

Knees and Oversized Head
with Half-Open Eyes

and Semicircle Mouth
That Juts Out

from the Face Some
Fine Scarification

Ms. Lewis arranges this material with genuine technical ingenuity, until its incremental emotional force begins to make you feel you have an elephant lowering itself onto your chest.

In her introduction to the 1973 anthology “The Poetry of Black America,” Gwendolyn Brooks asked, “Are there ways, is there any way, to make English words speak blackly?” With her long poem, Ms. Lewis suggests that one way to answer in the affirmative is by provocative and artful reappropriation.

In the two sections of lyric and sometimes personal poems that surround this title poem, Ms. Lewis’s verse sometimes has echoes of Brooks’s in its suppleness, and of Rita Dove’s in its shrewd rhetorical organization.

Ms. Lewis was born in Compton, Calif., and her family is from New Orleans. She has a graduate degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard Divinity School. You get a sense of the nimbleness and vigor of her verse in “Frame,” in which she recalls, as a young black girl, racing through a poor white family’s farm on her way to a pool:

There was a shack, I remember that, and an old house with an old lady.
She wore a dingy eyelet dress, and paced her porch dry
carrying a shotgun or a broom. Flip-flops, Blow-Pops, Click-Clacks,
Cracker Jacks, we barked Dog Talk with teeth still muddy and black

from Eat the Peg. Soft lime salamanders, fingers a vivid tangerine;
cow hooves grafted to arid grime; date palms with roots so determined
they sucked up all the water from the other things with leaves.

There are poems in “Voyage of the Sable Venus” about travel, family, death (in one, a family pulls the plug on a hospitalized man while playing his favorite Ray Charles song), art, history and sexuality.

A poem about incest titled “Lure” unspools as a series of negative statements and builds hideous power:

I am not three.
You are not seventy-nine. …
This is not your hand, your mouth,
your Pall Mall fingers, your fishhooks, your pearl-
handled switchblade. My father is not at work
mopping floors, unaware of me, sitting here
inside your lap. Alligator.

A photograph by Eudora Welty in the 1930s, titled “Window Shopping,” adorns this book’s cover. It depicts a young black woman in her Sunday best, chin in hand, staring into a store window in Grenada, Miss. It’s an image — with its implied interrogation of how even the most sensitive of white observers views a black subject — that further complicates this book’s project.

In the lesser poems in this volume, Ms. Lewis’s language can turn gauzy. In one poem we read, for example: “Pray/the stars/are all the feelings.” This kind of thing is rare in “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” however.

More often, her poems land with defoliating force. “Frame” ends with these stanzas about the stereotypical images of blacks in the speaker’s textbooks, one a photo of the dead Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the others photos of field hands or worse:

Every year these four photographs
taught us how English was really a type of trick math:
like the naked Emperor, you could be a King
capable of imagining just one single dream;

or there could be a body, bloody
at your feet — then you could point at the sky;
or you could be a hunched-over cotton-picking shame;
or you could swing from a tree by your neck into the frame.

After Ms. Lewis has handled them, few American images, or their frames, look quite the same. - DWIGHT GARNER