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 book was an expansive hybrid photographic-poetic study of human migration and the human family. Now she delivers a poem-performance in four parts that originated as a multimedia collaboration with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Ziegler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu. With Lewis on the microphone, offering a lyrical reading of this sequence, 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. Now brought to life on the page, the poem weaves in and out of Cavafy's rooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic need underpinning his work, as Lewis converses directly with him: "often you / reminded us that // 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/Closet Anthem: Self-Portrait at Sixteen: 1979."

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, and the unfolding journey of being human, whose contours become clear only with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.