Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy

by Robin Coste Lewis

The National Book Award, PEN/Voelker, and NAACP Image Award winner returns with another inventive and boundary-breaking a sensual journey ignited in the archives of iconic queer Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy

In her first book, Robin Coste Lewis's poems exploded the imagery of the Black female figure from anitiquity through the present day; her second was an expansive hybrid photographic-poetic study of human migration and the human family; now she delivers a slim “performance in four parts,” which originated as an actual sound performance with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Ziegler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu. With Lewis as the speaking voice, the quartet reflected on desire, diaspora, and the liminal spaces where art asserts itself, ignited by their encounters with Cavafy's archive in the heart of Athens. Robin weaves in and out of Cavafy's rooms, notebooks, and the  suppressed erotic need underpinning his work, conversing directly with “often you/ reminded us/ the only true // barbarians/ are the ones raging in silence / inside // of our own / minds.” But she brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Self-Portrait at 16.” 

As in all Robin's works, she reaches across centuries here to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single the discipline and glory of art, the give and take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, the unfolding journey of being human whose contours only become clear with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2025

About the author

Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, as well as a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lush book-length poem in four parts that channels,
In part, Constantin Cavafy but then becomes its own wondrous thing. An archive of desire, indeed.

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Knopf for sending me a copy of this incredible collection!

This collections feels in communion with time. It has a contemplation of universal feeling and experience while also tacking that insular, personal insight. It’s a conversation between the author and the queer, Alexandrian poet— CP Cavafy. It is about love, art and humanity… the inevitability and importance of a connection to those things.

I love poetry so much. What a gift, we are given, to see inside of others in this way, to have the rhythm of a thing illuminate the emotion, reality, truth of it. This collection is wonderful and another that I would highly recommend. Honestly, the collections that Knopf releases always blow me away! So diverse in both authorship but also in experiences and ambitions — but also with this rallying cry for connection and understanding.

[Cait · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection puts Cavafy's queerness forward. It makes him brown. (He was very proud of his English roots so this I do wonder about.) But I was introduced to Cavafy the classicist years ago, not Cavafy the gay lover, and certainly not Cavafy our queer forefather. Coste Lewis is brilliant at revising history to recover it in her poems, or possibly the other way around. This book needs to sit with Cavafy too.

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Everyone likes to believe they were planned. I don't want to break anyone's heart, but most of us were accidents- and that might be the best thing about our births: how our parents had to rally to play their roles, to pretend that they enjoyed the eternal trap that love had set for them."

fuck.

[Charnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I loved the most was the epilogue. To get an inside look of why the author chose to write this four part poem for Cavafy was lovely to read.

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

can't believe I didn't know this existed.

[Books Amongst Friends · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gifted Copy/Collection Overall: 4.5/5

[atito · Rating 3 out of 5]

transposition can be very good! very lovely argument in favor of less rigid identification :-)

[anna jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

queer women writing is really something so special and breathless

[Diana Arterian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lewis once again gifts us a book of gorgeous poems. "Archive of Desire" circles how we ache for connection—how ancient that is, as is everything that keeps us apart (usually ourselves). This is the kind of collection we all need now more than ever, determined by love and relating to one another.

[H]

o this is excellent. this made me want to write, which is the highest compliment i can give