The poet’s new book of photographs and verse is haunted by the dead who will not stay dead.

By Hilton Als
FROM: The New Yorker

The poet Robin Coste Lewis’s second collection, the exquisite To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf), is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Not only because the author believes, or wants to believe, that she can awaken the deceased with her pen—“I am trying to make the dead clap and shout,” she writes—but because those who are gone are determined not to stay put. Not in the heart, and certainly not in memory.

In a sense, Lewis’s elegiac and haunted volume, filled with both words and photographs, found her long before she conceived it. Twenty-five years ago, Lewis was living in Rhode Island, teaching at Wheaton College and writing fiction. (She had received a B.A. from Hampshire College, where she compared African and South Asian diasporic literature, in 1989, and studied Sanskrit and comparative religious literature at Harvard’s Divinity School, where she earned a master’s degree in 1997.) But she returned home to Los Angeles after the death of her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Mary Coste Thomas Brooks, to empty out her house, which was going to be razed. Under Brooks’s bed, Lewis found a suitcase containing hundreds of photographs—some in black-and-white, some in color, some posed, others candid—that were a record not only of Lewis’s large extended family but of worlds that had vanished, of decisive moments that had come and gone during the Second Great Migration, of which Lewis’s family, which originated in Louisiana, had been a part. It was unclear who had taken the photographs, but, by collecting the images and storing them together in that suitcase, Brooks had created a kind of narrative. It fell to her granddaughter to place it within the larger history of humanity.

Rather like Pilate, in Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon, who carries around the bones of her father because doing so, she says, “frees up your mind”—which is to say, frees you from the burden of history so that you can think about other things—Lewis has now been carrying her forebears with her for a quarter century. These bones don’t so much free up her mind as feed her imagination—and quarrel with the usual ways in which history gets told. To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness assembles a hundred and seventy-nine photographs from Brooks’s collection; interspersed with the images are short poems, sometimes just a line or two, that look like ticker tape from a ghostly world and read like messages in bottles cast out to sea by an emotionally marooned person with a surfeit of longing, hoping for love.

Lewis is no stranger to psychological or physical injury. When I first spoke to her, for a radio interview in 2015, she recounted a terrible accident she’d had in 2001: after dining at a restaurant in San Francisco, she got up to get her coat and fell into a hole in the floor that had not been cordoned off. She suffered brain damage, to the extent that doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to write more than one line a day. So she worked on a line every day in her mind. Other lines followed. This was when she transitioned from writing prose to writing poetry. Read Rest of Review Here