While the grammar is completely modified-I erased all periods, commas, semicolons-each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented.Ģ. No title could be broken or changed in any way. The formal rules I set for myself were simple:ġ. And with the history of slavery in the Western world, in which Black people were made object and capital, confined to a life of hard labor, dishonor, and degradation, the concept of image, indeed, takes on greater metaphorical (and perhaps even material) power, one that should not necessarily be disentangled from what it means to narrate new histories and offer new perspectives.What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,OOO BCE to the present. A photograph is not only captured but also contained, ostensibly stuck in place forever. Yet the risk of misunderstanding or distorting the meaning of an image is also quite high, which is a tension that Voyage of the Sable Venus explores. There is a sense of freedom, movement, and ethics.

And there is great beauty in this opacity. All that we can know of her is what we either project or imagine. Who is doing the looking? Who or what is being looked upon? How are these positions informed by the weight of history or imbalanced power dynamics? And how can these hierarchies shift through language and narrative? Indeed, while we may be looking at the woman, it appears, if only for an instant, that she is in a world entirely of her own making and we cannot attend to it (at least directly). The sepia-toned image, titled Window Shopping, was taken by the celebrated American writer Eudora Welty in 1930s Mississippi and is evocative for a host of reasons-not only is the photo elegant, with a quiet, powerful air of introspection, longing, personality, and verisimilitude, but it also obliquely highlights the central themes and aspects of the collection.įor one, the notion of perspective is a major narrative question in Lewis’s collection. While Robin Coste Lewis’s poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, finds its inspiration and emerges from Thomas Stothard’s 18th-century painting Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies, the image on the collection’s cover seems curiously contemporary (though it is not), featuring a lone Black woman gazing intensely on an unknown object in a store.

The sable venus