Voyage of the Sable Venus

Robin Coste Lewis’s debut collection is in three parts. The first and third are mostly first-person lyric poems. Between them sits the title poem, 79 pages long and named for an image by the British painter Thomas Stothard.

It is made up entirely of titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions of objects in Western art that depict the black female form, reaching back to 38,000 BC. The collection has been described as a meditation on cultural and artistic depictions of the black female figure, setting autobiographical verse beside reflections on stereotype and art.