Postmodern Culture

Abstract:

In Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (2015), Robin Coste Lewis deploys “horrible beauty” as a dissensual aesthetic experience that challenges the perceiving subject. To experience horrible beauty, in Lewis’s poetry, is to be called to reflect on and critique the pathologies of whiteness upheld and perpetuated by aesthetic scenes, as well as to reframe what has been rendered either invisible or hypervisible. By arresting the perceiving subject, horrible beauty functions as a political aesthetic in its critique of the ways that regimes of race, gender, and sexuality both shape and foreclose experience.