The poet Robin Coste Lewis’s second collection, the exquisite “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” (Knopf ), is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Not only because the author believes, or wants to believe, that she can awaken the deceased with her pen—“I am trying to make the dead clap and shout,” she writes—but because those who are gone are determined not to stay put. Not in the heart, and certainly not in memory.
In a sense, Lewis’s elegiac and haunted volume, filled with both words and photographs, found her long before she conceived it. Twenty-five years ago, Lewis was living in Rhode Island, teaching at Wheaton College and writing fiction. (She had received a B.A. from Hampshire College, where she compared African and South Asian diasporic literature, in 1989, and studied Sanskrit and comparative religious literature at Harvard’s Divinity School, where she earned a master’s degree in 1997.) But she returned home to Los Angeles after the death of her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Mary Coste Thomas Brooks, to empty out her house, which was going to be razed. Under Brooks’s bed, Lewis found a suitcase containing hundreds of photographs—some in black-and-white, some in color, some posed, others candid—that were a record not only of Lewis’s large extended family but of worlds that had vanished, of decisive moments that had come and gone during the Second Great Migration, of which Lewis’s family, which originated in Louisiana, had been a part. It was unclear who had taken the photographs, but, by collecting the images and storing them together in that suitcase, Brooks had created a kind of narrative. It fell to her granddaughter to place it within the larger history of humanity.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
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Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
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RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.