Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems Quotes

“.'All is suffering' is a bad modernist translation. What the Buddha really said is: It's all a mixed bag. Shit is complicated. Everything's fucked up. Everything's gorgeous.”
― Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

“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. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original worry 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.”
― Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

“I have to go back/ to that wet black thing/ dead in the road. I have to turn around./ I must put my face in it.”
― Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems