Book Launch – Without Terminus: untraining an archive by chaun webster
Save the Date!
Join us for an afternoon of reading, conversation, and fellowship with poet and sound artist chaun webster and archival curator and artist Davu Seru.
chaun webster’s third collection, Without Terminus: untraining an archive, is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving work — part elegy, part archival detective story, part visual poem. Drawing on his family’s history as Pullman porters, webster explores Black rest, memory, and the labor that grief demands of the living.
Kirkus Reviews calls it “a virtuoso work of literary experimentation in the service of a forgotten history.” Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part, describes it as “an act of revolution cloaked in the language of poetry, wielding a heart full of courage.”
This is a free event. Registration details coming soon — sign up for our email list to get updates.
More praise for Without Terminus: untraining an archive
“Without Terminus tracks chaun webster gone further into that which won’t stop, even for that last, bleak station. In his third 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
“A beautifully lyrical rumination on unknowing. 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 is an unflinching document of familial love and the legacy of Blackness in America. It is an act of revolution cloaked in the language of poetry, wielding a heart full of courage.”
—Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part