Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poemsby Robin Coste LewisKnopf, 2015The most immediate thing about Robin Coste Lewis's debut poetry volume, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, is the gorgeous job Knopf has done producing its hardcover edition: the paper is thick and creamy, the volume is deckle-edged and fractionally oversized, and the dust jacket design by Stephanie Ross is eye-catchingly stately. For a general reading public more wary of contemporary poetry than any before it, such an alluring package will surely do good work to defuse that wariness and invite them in.What they'll find is a largely marvelous collection of meditations on race, gender, motherhood, and history. The book is divided into three sections: two sections of shorter poems bookending the central part of the work, a long piece named “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” in which Lewis collects “the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” The material choices Lewis makes in this long work are consistently fascinating in the way they flicker back and forth between humanity and crassness, and that carefully-calibrated oscillation between outrage and irony runs moves the whole book, from the anger and acid sarcasm of “From:/To:”:

At last, a dark murderous lunaticto whom they are allowed to respond.Here, no one expects them to be strungup by their necks – dangled – and then left.To be cut down from a tall tree – and not cry,No law- here – will require them to watchtheir families hurled on top of the world's bright pyre,over generations – without complaint -unattended by rage's holinessor the clear mirror of grief. They find somechalk to celebrate. While one loads, one lifts,then checks. Just before they ignite the bomb,they write on its shell – FROM HARLEM, TO HITLER -then stand back for the camera, smiling.

 To the more world-weary and dogged “Summer”: 

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skinon my small porch, two mornings in a row. Beingpostmodern now, I pretended as if I did not seethem, nor understand what I knew to be circlinginside me. Instead, every hour I told my sonto stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeleda banana. And cursed God – His arrogance,His gall – to still expect our devotionafter creating love. And mosquitoes. I showedmy son the papery dead skins so he couldknow, too, what it feels like when something shows upat your door – twice – telling you what you already know.

There are some strained presentations, some clunky attempts at cheap moralizing, but the cumulative power of Lewis's poetic vision is arresting. In the portion of “Frame” that recalls the textbook illustrations of her youth, for instance, the iconic photo taken immediately after Martin Luther King was shot figures in a cascade of conflicting images and one horribly final sound:

Our textbooks stuttered over the same four pictures every year: that girlin the foreground, on the balcony: black loafers, white bobby socks, black skirt,cardigan, white collar. Her hand pointing. The others – all men – lookingso smart, shirt-and-tied, like the gentle men on my street, pointing

as well, toward the air -the blank page, the well-worn hollow space -from which the answer was alwaysthat same hoary thud.

Voyage of the Sable Venus, this pitiless moral accounting wrapped in its pretty cover, is a finalist for the National Book Award and richly deserves to win it and the wider audience that comes with it.