Page 157 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

extinction. Here, in the valley, where the poet was young, the land was already

cementing into sprawl. “I never knew what, if anything, they grew. Never knew of

a harvest./ Never saw a thing begin as seed, or sow its way to plant, flower, fruit.”

Coste Lewis reminds us that places of extinction and trauma, like New Orleans,

like Flint, Michigan, like South Central L.A. and Stockton, California (where I live),

are indeed connected to “the Sable Venus”— to the bodies that were and are the

traffic and casualties of Capitalism. These places are trashed. People live in

them. And yet, as Coste Lewis observes, they are also gorgeous. That’s another

tension that’s hard to bear.

In thinking about The Voyage of the Sable Venus, I have also thought about the

tension between environmentalism and racism, between the concerns of the

Green movement and Black Lives Matter. In Naomi Klein’s recent essay for The

London Review of Books, “Let Them Drown: The Othering of Violence in a

Warming World,” she observes: “People do tend to get cynical when their lives

are treated as less important than flowers and reptiles.” To borrow from Naomi

Klein’s reassessment of Edward Said, perhaps there are “ways we might

respond that are far more inclusive than current campaign models: ways that

don’t ask suffering people to shelve their concerns about war, poverty, and

systemic racism and ‘first save the world’—but instead demonstrate how all these

crises are interconnected.” It seems to me that poetry is one of the ways in which

we know that our crises our interconnected. I would argue that Robin Coste

Lewis’s work teaches us how we must slow down before we can see how beauty

and catastrophe are part of the same traffic of the human, a traffic in which we

are all implicated.

Camille Norton teaches literature at University of the

Pacific, in Stockton, California. She is the author of

Corruption: Poems.