Overview
Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmotherās death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewisās family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of āraceā and āmigration,ā placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.
In what she calls āa film for the handsā and āan origin myth for the future,ā Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: āBlack pages, black space, black timeāāthe Big Black Bang.ā From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us āan exaltedĀ Black privacy.ā What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. āI am trying / to make the gods / happy,ā she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. āI am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.ā
This book title, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, ISBN: 9781524732585, by Robin Coste Lewis, published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (October 4, 2022) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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