Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)
Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis
Add Voyage of the Sable Venus to bookshelf
Add to Bookshelf

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Best Seller
Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis
Paperback $21.00
Nov 21, 2017 | ISBN 9781101911204

Buy from Other Retailers:

See All Formats (2) +
  • $21.00

    Nov 21, 2017 | ISBN 9781101911204

    Buy from Other Retailers:

  • Sep 29, 2015 | ISBN 9781101875445

    Buy from Other Retailers:

  • Aug 31, 2021 | ISBN 9780593461044

    186 Minutes

    Buy from Other Retailers:

Buy the Audiobook Download:

Listen to a sample from Voyage of the Sable Venus

Product Details

Praise

“Powerfully evocative . . . Among the virtues of the collection is the intensity of Lewis’s faith in the power of language and image to tell us things that are true, but that are rarely said, about history, race, gender, power, the body, scholarship, and visual representation. In providing us with a revelatory gloss on centuries of art, Robin Coste Lewis has made us aware of the enormity of the change reflected and perhaps partly brought about by contemporary black women artists whose vision, originality, and humor offer a heartening corrective to the ghastly insult of the Sable Venus.” —Francine Prose, New York Review of Books

“Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus is an experimental tribute to a human history that embraces truth and adventure. She shows how cultures traverse terrains and comingle. These poignant poems, through a poetic excavation, unearth figures that make us question racial constructs. The body is at the center of this imagistic inquiry, and each line is a blind stitch in the psychological metrics of the whole. Lewis’s first collection, a detailed tapestry of ancient and modern behavior—names, dates, and emotional marginalia—is one of a kind.”  —Yusef Komunyakaa

“Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems reframes the black figure, most specifically the black female, by pointing out the borders of black beauty, black happiness, and black resilience in our canonical visual culture. Tender and masterful opening and closing poems bookend the archival, lyric masterwork, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” at the center of the collection. This title poem upends the language of representation, collected from the cataloging of the black body in Western art. Robin Coste Lewis takes back depictions of the black feminine and refuses to land or hold down that which has always been alive and loving and lovely. Altogether new, open, experimental and ground-breaking, Lewis privileges real life in all its complications, surprises and triumphs over the frames that have locked down the scale of black womanhood.” —Claudia Rankine

Awards

National Book Award FINALIST 2015

Looking for More Great Reads?
21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read
Back to Top