robin coste lewis voyage of the sable venus

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. Voyage of the Sable Venus contains three parts. 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. Everything’s gorgeous” so neatly traces my pendulum-like emotional response to the poems in this collection. 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).

“What the Buddha really said is: It’s all a mixed bag. “ All is suffering is a bad modernist translation,” Robin Coste Lewis explains.

Robin coste lewis voyage of the sable venus