Robin Coste Lewis's Books

Voyage of the Sable Venus

and Other Poems

By: Robin Coste Lewis

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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.

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Page Count

178

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101911204

ISBN 13

9781101911204

To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

By: Robin Coste Lewis

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To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

By: Robin Coste Lewis

A genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration—another revelatory visual expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. • Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry “Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother’s bed only days before the house was slated to be razed.” —Kevin Young, The New Yorker Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history. In what she calls “a film for the hands” and “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: “Black pages, black space, black time––the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”

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Page Count

385

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

1524732591

ISBN 13

9781524732592

Voyage of the Sable Venus

and Other Poems

By: Robin Coste Lewis

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Voyage of the Sable Venus

and Other Poems

By: Robin Coste Lewis

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

178

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101911204

ISBN 13

9781101911204

Robert Rauschenberg

Thirty-four Illustrations for Dante's Inferno

By: Robert Rauschenberg,Leah Dickerman,Robin Coste Lewis,Kevin Young

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Robert Rauschenberg

Thirty-four Illustrations for Dante's Inferno

By: Robert Rauschenberg,Leah Dickerman,Robin Coste Lewis,Kevin Young

Published to accompany a major traveling exhibition, this small volume presents the 34 drawings Rauschenberg made for each canto of Dante's Inferno. Between 1958 and 1960, Robert Rauschenberg made drawings for each of the thirtyfour cantos, or sections, of Dante's fourteenth-century poem Inferno by using a novel technique to transfer photographic reproductions from magazines or newspapers onto paper. Acquired by The Museum of Modern Art soon after it was completed, the resulting work is his most sustained exercise in the medium of drawing and a testament to Rauschenberg's desire to bring his experience of the contemporary world into his art. The drawings weave together meditations on public and private spheres, politics and inner life. Above all, they pay homage to creativity in dialogue: each drawing is a conversation with Dante across the centuries. This volume includes newly commissioned poems by Robin Coste Lewis and Kevin Young that offer contemporary responses to Rauschenberg's celebrated series and an essay by MoMA curator Leah Dickerman that explores its making in depth.

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Page Count

104

Publisher

Moma

Published Date

ISBN 10

1633450295

ISBN 13

9781633450295

Book's by Robin Coste Lewis

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Voyage of the Sable Venus

To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

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