To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

By: Robin Coste Lewis

Narrated by: Robin Coste Lewis

A genre-bending exploration of poetry and human migration—another revelatory expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure.

Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis was inspired to create stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.

In what she calls “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of poetry: “Black pages, black space, black time––the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”

©2022 Robin Coste Lewis (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry • NAACP Image Awards Winner • Best Book of 2022: CNN Style

"Robin Coste Lewis has created a photographic and linguistic archive that draws from the pre-diasporic truth of family—family before Blackness and before the permutations of misunderstandings by others about 'us.' Her poems never stop offering me ways to more deeply understand the complex ways of being migratory, beautiful and optimistic in times of gross inequity. Lewis creates light and portals that reveal our truth through words and the images underneath our grandmother's bed."—Theaster Gates, CNN

"The exquisite To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Lewis’s elegiac and haunted volume . . . is another voyage. But the view is different, as is the destination: what Lewis is resuscitating here is a community, a family she knew or wishes she’d known."—Hilton Als, The New Yorker

“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