To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

In To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, Robin Coste Lewis forges spare, moving fables of untold (pre)histories:

I remembered you then,
           not from the past, but from
                      a bright inkling
inside my body
           that some would later call the future.

Lines of poetry are put into dialogue with a family archive of tintype, sepia, and black-and-white photographs depicting babies, brides, ancestors. Lewis’s photopoetic units break with the ekphrastic model of a text captioning an image, or an image illustrating a poem. Instead, her oblique juxtapositions of text and photograph spark unexpected electric arcs, illuminating the photographic subjects’ inner lives. 

Lewis’s language has a washed clarity. Single lines in poems are rich as monostichs: “My body a constantly ripening orchard seen only by satellites”; “His face is a whole flock of starlings, which suddenly alights upon me—me, bare winter tree.” The poet freights small words—child, water, night, time, one—with a charged lucidity: 

Must we see
           ourselves
                      in the water?

Must
           the water
                      be still?

Water is a communal bond in Lewis’s creation myths: “Everyone had become water. Land was a story the old people had told to frighten the little children, to keep us from running off.” And water is also a universal, amniotic origin: 

Later, when people asked us,
Where did you come from?
We could only answer water.

A whole language comprised
of just one word. […]

The first half of the book, with its white type on black pages, emerged from Intimacy, a multimedia collaboration with visual artist Julie Mehretu. The energy of the later poems is just as tautly managed. In the long poem “The Ark: Self-Portrait as Aphrodite Using Her Dress for a Sail,” the speaker addresses Black Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, born in 1866: “that nine-year-old runaway on a dark winter road, bruised and brave, he steps forth from your cold, warm body. An iceberg breaks free, calving. And what finally comes out isn’t bile, Matthew, but water.” 

At once authoritative and piercingly human, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness is an extraordinary atlas for an unmapped world.