{"title":"Robin Coste Lewis","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"voyage-of-the-sable-venus-book-robin-coste-lewis-9781101875438","title":"Voyage Of The Sable Venus","description":"\u003cp\u003eWINER OF THE NATIONAL BOK AWARD \u003cbr\u003eA stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice. \u003cbr\u003e Robin Coste Lewis s electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, Voyage of the Sable Venus, a riveting 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 autobiographical poems, Voyage is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, as it juxtaposes our names for things with what we actually see and know. Offering 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 has art played in this ancient, often heinous story? From the Young Black Female Carrying \/ a Perfume Vase to a Little Brown Girl \/ Girl Standing in a Tree \/ First Day of Voluntary \/ School Integration, this poet 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 and how they define us all, including herself, as she explores 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50208897663249,"sku":"CIN1101875437G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52105745989905,"sku":"CIN1101875437VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53016435097873,"sku":"GOR014696956","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53033343877393,"sku":"GOR009215889","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1101875437.jpg?v=1751080741"},{"product_id":"archive-of-desire-book-robin-coste-lewis-9781524732608","title":"Archive of Desire","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe National Book Award, PEN\/Voelcker Award, and NAACP Image Award winner returns with another inventive and boundary-breaking book: a sensual journey ignited in the archives of iconic queer Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In her first book, Robin Coste Lewis's poems exploded the imagery of the Black female figure from antiquity through the present day. Her second book was an expansive hybrid photographic and poetic study of human migration and the human family. Now she delivers a \"poem in four parts,\" which originated as a musical, visual, and lyrical collaboration with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu, with Lewis on the microphone offering a live reading of this sequence. Ignited by their encounters with Cavafy's archive, in the heart of Athens, the multimedia quartet exalted the liminal spaces where desire and diaspora meet--where art often asserts itself most forcefully. In this volume, Lewis brings this performance to life on the page, where the poem weaves in and out of Cavafy's bedrooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic excavation underpinning all of his work. Lewis converses directly with Mr. Cavafy: \"often you \/ reminded us that \/\/ the only true \/ barbarians are the ones \/ raging in silence inside \/\/ of our own \/ minds.\" But she also brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled \"Cavafy in Compton\/Closet Anthem: Self-Portrait at Sixteen, 1979.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e As in all Lewis's works, here she reaches across centuries to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single selves: the discipline and glory of art, the give-and-take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, and the unfolding journey of being human, whose contours become clear only with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52487296811281,"sku":"CIN1524732605VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52500167459089,"sku":"NIN9781524732608","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781524732608.jpg?v=1759860578"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-robin-coste-lewis.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}