Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

Three short passages from Voyage of the Sable Venus:

Pray
the stars
are all the feelings

we refused to love
and somehow
they have forgiven us

our refusal
to address them
by their animal names

All is suffering is a bad modernist translation. What the Buddha really said is: It’s all a mixed bag. Shit is complicated. Everything’s fucked up. Everything’s gorgeous.

Beauty isn’t pretty. Beauty and pretty are enemies. Pretty is a Yes Man, dressed in colonial drag, passing for a lady. While Beauty is a double agent. Beauty is a war cry. And Her first commandment is to say well hidden.

This amazing book of poetry gave me all the feels. There are fistfulls of social commentary on race, class, gender, and sexuality that punch you right in the heart and the brain and the gut.

The book is split into three acts, with different poem "movements" in each. Of particular mention is the second act, which contains a single, 70+ page poem reflecting on the way people of color have been represented in art. An unbelievable work of scholarship and language, it's beyond explanation here. Just read it. The poet's moving and beautiful use of language in this collection is just beyond anything I've ever read. Unbelievably moving and captivating. Definitely something that will stick with me, and I'll re-read often.

A haunting, intense, moving collection of poetry, both personal and political. The title piece is composed solely from titles and descriptions used in Western museums to describe art/art objects depicting women of color. When I heard about it, I thought it would be hokey, but it was a staggeringly good/depressing/painful/shocking/illuminating piece.

In this political climate, when an elected official huffily asks what other "subgroups" contributed to civilization more than whites, and in this era of the #blacklivesmatter and #sayhername movements, this collection feels especially prescient.

Frequently and consistently, black women poets put out poignant and crafted work. The way the the popular cultural narrative in constructed, you wouldn't think a black woman wrote a poetry collection between Maya Angelou and Claudia Rankine. However, with Rankine's popularity, we can only hope that phenomenal black women writers like Coste-Lewis will be recognized for their work.

This collection is a lyrical maelstrom of art history, personal trauma, beauty, anger, and profound love. The poet's voice is at once elevated down to earth, musical and sharp, humorous and thoughtful. Many other poets aiming for the balance that Coste-Lewis achieves here would come out lopsided, but the thread she creates artfully unites race, art sexuality, show more and womanhood. A beautiful book. show less

A wonderfully varied and vastly creative collection of poetry that won the National Book Award. The title poem is a long narrative composed entirely of entries of descriptions of art at museums and in catalogs (everywhere) across the world. What a unique undertaking by making descriptions of art into art itself. The unifying subject is that all the art's subjects are black females. I really loved the poems toward the end of the collection which are more personal about the author's life over the years. It is tremendously well done start to finish.

This book is separated into three sections. The first and third are rather traditional poetry.

The second, though. In the second section, Coste Lewis uses the descriptions on artwork featuring black female figures, and creates poems. She used descriptions from museums around the world (and cited at the end of the section). By arranging the phrases differently--into sentences, or by using similar phrases--the poems she creates vary greatly. This idea makes me think of both Travesty Generator and The Galleons: Poems, both longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.

The third section features some poems having to do with Los Angeles and growing up in Compton. I read this book with the California Book Club, all of their previous show more choices have been set in California, so this one did not fit as well and was definitely not what I expected. show less

Another book where a literary exercise is at the center, but Lewis pulls it off fairly convincingly. The poem that covers the various black Madonnas she's found (the exercise is using names and descriptions of art that depicts black women) is beautiful and some of the later ones didn't even feel like museum descriptions, though many of those were astonishingly beautiful. There was also a lot of embodiment thematics contrasted with a sustained interest in "Eastern" religions as well as embodiment as it tied in to motherhood.