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Lewis is a conceptual poet yet how unlike the sensationalized recent white projects that blithely replicate trauma of/against POC bodies.

What does it mean in 2015 to scour a seemingly infinite network of references to the black body throughout Western art history and from those searches forge a poem? Lewis is a lyric poet yet how unlike Wallace Stevens’ The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage whose “irretrievable way” reads as insular symbol of the imagination. And still, this grand poem is also a reckoning that goes back to what poetry, art and race have in violent commonality: the power of naming. Lewis describes the project in her Prologue below as a “narrative poem” but one could also call it a feminist/queer epic, a conceptual tour de force, a revolutionary re-naming, hallucinated index, resurrected archive. Are you ready to descend, enter, follow and be marked by these lyrics that make up the long-poem sequence of Robin Coste Lewis’ debut poetry collection, just published from Knopf, a sequence which also grants her book its gorgeous (and ghostly) title: Voyage of the Sable Venus.