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New Works | To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, with Robin Coste Lewis
February 28 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
New Works|To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, with Robin Coste Lewis
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. (EST)
The New School (Venue TBD)
In-Person Registration
Live-Stream Registration
In her long-awaited second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, Robin Coste Lewis invites readers into an intimate manipulation, conspiring with a multiplicity of pasts and historical visions that expand Black life–both as experience and concept.
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR TO THE REALIZATION OF PERFECT HELPLESSNESS
“Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother’s bed only days before the house was slated to be razed. A sense of loss and near-loss pervades the book. The photopoem does more than preserve—it provokes, mourns, philosophizes, yearns, and celebrates, much like the jazz of Lewis’s ancestral Louisiana . . . Its achievement is cosmic and sonic.”—Kevin Young, The New Yorker
Robin Coste Lewis is the author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Alfred A. Knopf) and Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf), winner of the National Book Award in Poetry.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Seth Sprague Educational & Charitable Foundation. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Co-presented by The New School Creative Writing Program.