Voyage of the Sable Venus

Starred review from October 19, 2015
Lewis’s astonishing debut full-length collection works as a triptych, with the title poem’s central panel flanked by autobiographical lyric poems that investigate intersections of blackness and gender, geography, alienation, and the formation of the self. The speakers of these poems adopt a variety of tones, ranging from sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek to gut-wrenchingly sincere. While the book’s first and third sections shine with uncompromising and brilliantly constructed poems, it is the eponymous second section that is truly extraordinary: a narrative sequence composed entirely of titles, catalogues, and exhibition descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present. Through her recombination of found texts, Lewis denotes an assimilation of black femininity in the preexisting rhetoric of white-patriarchal depictions of the black female form in art and the museum setting. The procedure she employs is intentionally violent, parsing source material as it pertains to images of the black female form in a way that mimics the valuation of the black female body. As Lewis reworks fragments contextually rooted in ahistorical depictions of blackness, her meditations on the real origins of blackness are made visible. The result is a book that is formally polished, emotionally raw, and wholly exquisite.

October 15, 2015

In Lewis's (Provost's Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies, Univ. of Southern California) ambitious experimental three-part book, the first and third sections are made up of original poems and the second section (most of the book), "is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present." Like an erasure, then, the second section is a testament to playfulness but not originality. The list-like nature of those poems, epitomized by the pieces in "Catalog 4" (e.g., Our Lady/ of Presentation// Our Lady of the Confession"), reduces them to references, which have the benefit, as Yusef Komunyakaa says, of "mak[ing] us question racial constructs" in art history but little more. Lewis's original poems show range and density--the lines move easily between humor and social critique, and from narratives to fables, and put line breaks to great use ("Sometimes the ground swells/ With disappointment"). VERDICT Lacking a coherence across the sections, this title reads like two separate books.--Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH

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