A genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration--another revelatory visual expedition from the National Book Awardâwinning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure.\
Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmotherâs 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. Lewisâs 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 âraceâ and âmigration,â placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.\
In what she calls âa film for the handsâ and âan origin myth for the future,â Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: âBlack pages, black space, black timeââthe Big Black Bang.â 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 âan exalted Black privacy.â What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. âI am trying / to make the gods / happy,â she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. âI am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.â
Categories:
- Literature & Fiction
- United States
- Poetry
- Black & African American
- Poetry
- United States
Publisher : Knopf
Author : Lewis, Robin Coste
Language : English
Published :2022-12-06
Number Of Pages : 384
Binding : Hardcover
ISBN-10 : 1524732583
ISBN-13 : 9781524732585
Item weight : 2.85 lb
Dimensions : 1.23 in x 7.36 in x 9.51 in
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