Robin Coste Lewis, _The Voyage of the Sable Venus and other poems_

HAVE WE HIT some kind of golden age for African-American writing? Citizen, Between the World and Me, The Underground Railroad, The Sellout, and this one...and those are just the ones that won big prizes. We could also note John Keene's Counternarratives, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland, Gary Younge's Another Day in the Death of America (unless he counts as British), Dawn Lundy Martin...and I think I'm forgetting a few.

Why so many masterpieces in so short a span of time? I might not have noticed were it not for the prizes, but even so.

The tour de force in Lewis's book is the long poem in its middle section, composed entirely from the titles and catalog descriptions that western museums gave to works of art that represented women of African descent. If Citizen gained its power by describing circumstances that could inspire outrage in the coolest of tones, "Voyage of the Sable Venus" takes the tactic even further by restricting itself to nothing but the chilled-to-frostiness, aspiring-to-objectivity language of art history yet achieving soul-wrenching effects.

The poems in the book's first and third are remarkable too, highly finished, formally sophisticated, clearly not the work of a beginner, even though this is Lewis's first book. They too can get the needle all the way to the bone: "The Wilde Woman of Aiken," for instance, "or "Lure," or "Félicité."

Bad days for the republic, but a good time to be a reader, I guess, as in the 1850s, when The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Leaves of Grass showed up in the bookstores while the nation shuddered into dissolution.