Description

Book Synopsis

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 b

Voyage of the Sable Venus And Other Poems

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    A Paperback / softback by Robin Coste Lewis

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      Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
      Publication Date: 21/11/2017
      ISBN13: 9781101911204, 978-1101911204
      ISBN10: 1101911204

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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 b

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