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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
untraining an archive
by Chaun Webster
A dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Award–winning author.
In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know―and mourn―the kin he was never able to meet.
webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors' lives to those of several historical Black figures―Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry "Box" Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.
Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.
"Potent and prophetic, this is a singular achievement." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A virtuoso work of literary experimentation in the service of a forgotten history." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"chaun webster's Without Terminus is a beautifully lyrical rumination on unknowing. The word 'terminus' could be the end of a transportation line as well as a finishing point. Right away with the title, we see webster's facility with metaphoric language. For webster, 'without terminus' doesn't mean forever, as in elongated emptiness, but 'frayed edges' as a reclamation and new space, the limits as haven. This book is a marvel, a language and image train to travel with." ―Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
"Without Terminus tracks chaun webster gone further into that which won't stop, even for that last, bleak station. In his newest work, the poet considers the possibility of Black rest without Black death, the labor that memory demands of the living, and Black life as both fuel and lubricant for the U.S. progress engine. This work demands of webster new grammars, a hauntology, a means of being without, which is to say a praxis of knowing with grief even that which you can barely mourn. Deeply intimate and tirelessly self-interrogating, Without Terminus is webster at his best. Phenomenal!" ―Douglas Kearney, author of I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always
This information about Without Terminus was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Work by Chaun Webster has appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Angel City Review, Obsidian, The Rumpus, Social Text, and Tilted House. His books Gentry!fication and Wail Song each won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry.
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