Voyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems

by Robin Coste Lewis

Overview

This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time.

Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is 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—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know.

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 did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who 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—how they define us all, including 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101911204
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/21/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	1,124,326
Product dimensions:	0.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

ROBIN COSTE LEWIS, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, as well as a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

Table of Contents

I

Plantation 3

On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari 6

Mother Church No. 3 15

Verga: 16

The Wilde Woman of Aiken 17

The Mothers 19

From: To: 20

Beauty's Nest 21

Red All Over 22

Dog Talk 23

Let Me Live in a House by the Side of the Road and Be a Friend to Man 24

Summer 31

II Voyage of the Sable Venus

Prologue: 35

The Ship's Inventory: 38

Invocation: Blessing the Boat 40

Catalog 1 Ancient Greece & Ancient Rome 43

Catalog 2 Ancient Egypt 55

Catalog 3 The Womb of Christianity 64

Catalog 4 Medieval Colonial 71

Catalog 5 Emancipation & Independence 83

Catalog 6 Modern, Civil, Right 94

Catalog 7 Modern Post 100

Catalog 8 The Present/Our Town 110

Notes 111

III

Frame 117

Art & Craft 121

Lure 122

The Body in August 125

Second Line 126

Pleasure & Understanding 129

Félicité 132

Epilogue: "Boarding the Voyage" 139

Notes and Acknowledgments 161

Editorial Reviews

"Powerfully evocative . . . 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. 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

“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

From the Publisher

Robin Coste Lewis offers a breathless and hauntingly alluring narration of her poems about the Black female experience. This literary triptych is one for the listener to sit with repeatedly, imbibing the differing storylines in these lyrical works. Lewis is rhythmic in her narration. Her soft and warm voice conveys a strong, thick, whispering timbre, especially in Part I. There are also moments of faint desperation. In certain poems, like “Modern, Civil, Right,” Lewis plays with pitch, changing from low to high and vice versa, offering varying ways to understand the possible meanings of the poem. There is both pleasure and pain in this audiobook experience. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Robin Coste Lewis offers a breathless and hauntingly alluring narration of her poems about the Black female experience. This literary triptych is one for the listener to sit with repeatedly, imbibing the differing storylines in these lyrical works. Lewis is rhythmic in her narration. Her soft and warm voice conveys a strong, thick, whispering timbre, especially in Part I. There are also moments of faint desperation. In certain poems, like “Modern, Civil, Right,” Lewis plays with pitch, changing from low to high and vice versa, offering varying ways to understand the possible meanings of the poem. There is both pleasure and pain in this audiobook experience. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile