To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
Language: English
Published by Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2022
- Hardcover
- New

Seller: Revaluation Books, Exeter, United KingdomRevaluation Books
AbeBooks seller since January 6, 2003
Condition: New
£ 47.36
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
Seller Inventory # 1524732583
- Title
- To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
- Author
- Lewis, Robin Coste
- Publisher
- Alfred a Knopf Inc
- Publication year
- 2022
- Condition
- Brand New
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1524732583
- ISBN 13
- 9781524732585
- Item weight
- 1.28 kilograms
"Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother's bed only days before the house was slated to be razed." --Kevin Young, The New Yorker
Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother's 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. Lewis's 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 "race" and "migration," placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.
In what she calls "a film for the hands" and "an origin myth for the future," Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: "Black pages, black space, black time--the Big Black Bang." 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 "an exalted Black privacy." What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. "I am trying / to make the gods / happy," she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. "I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout."
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Revaluation Books
Exeter, United Kingdom
AbeBooks seller since January 6, 2003
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Edward Bowditch Ltd
Exstowe, Exton
Exeter, United Kingdom EX3 0PP
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Business correspondence address: Exstowe, Exton, Exeter, EX3 0PP
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