Archive of Desire

The National Book Award, PEN/Voelcker, and NAACP Image Award winner returns with another inventive and boundary-breaking book: 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 antiquity 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 Zeigler, 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. Lewis weaves in and out of Cavafy's rooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic need underpinning his work, conversing directly with him: "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 Compton: Self-Portrait at 16."

As in all Lewis's works, she reaches across centuries here to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single selves: 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.