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jayisreading's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
I admit that I didn’t fully follow everything that was happening in this collection, but I thought Lewis did an incredible job exploring cultural and artistic depictions of the Black female body. This was especially drawn to attention in the second of three sections (a long poem that is named after the Thomas Stothard painting and title of this collection), in which Lewis expands on this figure in Western art over centuries, found in dozens of museums (which she lists at the end of the section). I thought the explanation she provided at the start of this section really helped contextualize the purpose of this section:
“At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been either a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many nineteenth-century historically specific markers—such as slave, colored, and Negro—from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well intended), I re-erased the postmodern African-American, then changed those titles back. I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, curators, and art institutions have been in participating in—if not creating—this history.”
It took a little bit of time to connect the dots and figure out the purpose of the first and last sections and their ties to the centerpiece. I can’t say that I fully figured it out, but I certainly found these poems far more lyrical. They were also very engaging, but in a different way from “Voyage of the Sable Venus.”
I also loved the epilogue, which, in a way, was a beautiful meditation on the Black female body and art/culture that was explored throughout this collection. It was a powerful ending, and I certainly felt as though I finished a contemplative walk through a museum exhibition.
Some favorites: “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari,” “The Wilde Woman of Aiken,” “Let Me Live in a House by the Side of the Road and Be a Friend to Man,” and “Lure”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Sexism
Moderate: Rape, Sexual violence, and Death
Minor: Slavery
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