Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy

by Robin Coste Lewis

The National Book Award, PEN/Voelker, and NAACP Image Award winner returns with another inventive and boundary-breaking a sensual journey ignited in the archives of iconic queer Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy

In her first book, Robin Coste Lewis's poems exploded the imagery of the Black female figure from anitiquity through the present day; her second was an expansive hybrid photographic-poetic study of human migration and the human family; now she delivers a slim “performance in four parts,” which originated as an actual sound performance with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Ziegler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu. With Lewis as the speaking voice, the quartet reflected on desire, diaspora, and the liminal spaces where art asserts itself, ignited by their encounters with Cavafy's archive in the heart of Athens. Robin weaves in and out of Cavafy's rooms, notebooks, and the  suppressed erotic need underpinning his work, conversing directly with “often you/ reminded us/ the only true // barbarians/ are the ones raging in silence / inside // of our own / minds.” But she brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Self-Portrait at 16.” 

As in all Robin's works, she reaches across centuries here to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single the discipline and glory of art, the give and take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, the unfolding journey of being human whose contours only become clear with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2025

About the author

Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, as well as a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lush book-length poem in four parts that channels,
In part, Constantin Cavafy but then becomes its own wondrous thing. An archive of desire, indeed.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

These gorgeous, moving poems by the brilliant Robin Coste Lewis, responding to the poetry and soul and spirit of Constantine Cavafy. Lewis, a scholar as well as a much-awarded poet, was invited to create work in concert with a handful of noted artists--musicians, painter, etc for a Cavafy Festival organized by the Onassis Foundation, and as part of that, was brought to Athens to explore the Cavafy Archive. There were several performances of their joint work, but this book is Lewis's 'conversation' with the great Alexandrian poet, a touchstone for gay poets as well as poets of color, non-Europeans, and anyone else sensitive to beauty and history and the classical world.

What a collection this is! It melds the experience of Cavafy, in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1890s, with Lewis's own, growing up black and queer and full of life in 1980's Compton--a working-class black neighborhood in Los Angeles-- with a spirit too big to be confined into the small expectations of the LA City School System, spilling over to take on the world. As this is an archive, the first poem begins with Cavafy's handkerchiefs--he was quite the aficionado of good clothing--and ranges to Leonard Woolfe, who very much wanted to print Cavafy's poetry, to Alexandria, to the end of the poet's life

"Our cells
voracious without
the promise

of any fixed history--
all of our secret tames--ignited
and awakened--hurling themselves

off the volcanic cliffs
overlooking a bay called Marathon..."

My first encounter with Cavafy was in the pages of Durrell's Justine, overflowing with the true poet of the city--he even translates a Cavafy poem, the book is so saturated with him--a city of "Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections... But there are more than five sexes and only Demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them." The poet of this city is the poet Lewis is traveling with in Archives of Desire: conversing with, sometimes inhabiting his very skin, sometimes imagining herself one of the men the poet might invite into his carriage as he cruised the city, sometimes returning to her own skin and her own experience.

I found myself writing down line after line into my journal--each numbered section of the four 'parts' has its own form. These are long poems, intricate and changeable in point of view. Just a sample:

"... Time is just
a waterfall tinted a pale pink
with the gods' dark wine."

"And I shall not
fear my passions
like a coward. I shall
abandon my body

to its pleasure, to delight..."


"Ancient neighborhoods I fly over at night--wing by wing--each city built upon--dependent upon--the silence of the city buried beneath it..."

I'm afraid I'm just taking a corner, which to me is fragrant of the entire poem, but for you perhaps is only a question mark.

Just don't miss this exquisite book.

[Stacey Sturgis · Rating 5 out of 5]

5⭐️

Stunning monument to queer brown genius in the month of love and recognition of Black history by an unbelievably gifted Black queer woman poet. It doesn’t get any better than this.

78 pages of art that sings in your head, what are you waiting for?

I need a copy of this.

~~~~~~~~<<<<

I checked this book out from my public library. Walk into any public library, and you’ll find more than books—you’ll find people. Kids finishing homework at a study table. Parents and toddlers gathered for storytime. Job seekers fine-tuning their resumes on public computers. Neighbors swapping gardening tips at a community workshop. Libraries are centers for learning, connection, and opportunity, adapting to meet the needs of their communities by filling gaps in education, access to technology, and even basic necessities. Support your local library 📚!

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Archive of Desire by Robin Coste Lewis

I loved this poetry and her telling of her life and what she wrote in the acknowledgments. Very alive. And I want to read Cavafy and of course more of Robin’s work.

From their acknowledgments:
I think it was Whoopi Goldberg who once said that homosexuality is as old as air. And I think it was Freud who said that heterosexuality is the actual anomaly. I really don’t give a damn. Now that I am an old broad, all I can say is: Gender is stupid. Let’s set it aside and never pick it up again except to play with it for the toy that it is.

From the poetry

And at first, I thought,
after I arrived, that
I would rush out

to see the World, to look
at everything. But then
I decided to get back into my bed

and look around
at the Worlds
inside me.

And to imagine what your world
and my world might do with—
and to—one another.

I look out, past the Acropolis,
at a boat so casually navigating
the rough sea.

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Knopf for sending me a copy of this incredible collection!

This collections feels in communion with time. It has a contemplation of universal feeling and experience while also tacking that insular, personal insight. It’s a conversation between the author and the queer, Alexandrian poet— CP Cavafy. It is about love, art and humanity… the inevitability and importance of a connection to those things.

I love poetry so much. What a gift, we are given, to see inside of others in this way, to have the rhythm of a thing illuminate the emotion, reality, truth of it. This collection is wonderful and another that I would highly recommend. Honestly, the collections that Knopf releases always blow me away! So diverse in both authorship but also in experiences and ambitions — but also with this rallying cry for connection and understanding.

[Charnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I loved the most was the epilogue. To get an inside look of why the author chose to write this four part poem for Cavafy was lovely to read.

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

can't believe I didn't know this existed.

[Books Amongst Friends · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gifted Copy/Collection Overall: 4.5/5

[Cait · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection puts Cavafy's queerness forward. It makes him brown. (He was very proud of his English roots so this I do wonder about.) But I was introduced to Cavafy the classicist years ago, not Cavafy the gay lover, and certainly not Cavafy our queer forefather. Coste Lewis is brilliant at revising history to recover it in her poems, or possibly the other way around. This book needs to sit with Cavafy too.

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Everyone likes to believe they were planned. I don't want to break anyone's heart, but most of us were accidents- and that might be the best thing about our births: how our parents had to rally to play their roles, to pretend that they enjoyed the eternal trap that love had set for them."

fuck.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fluid and warm, this homage to Cavafy falls completely within the norms of contemporary American poetry—which is to say, it’s merely good, not at all as inventive and surprising as Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus.

[atito · Rating 3 out of 5]

transposition can be very good! very lovely argument in favor of less rigid identification :-)

[anna jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

queer women writing is really something so special and breathless

[The_J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too little specatucular, but some nice pieces.

"I want you
to demand
everything."

"Love him and let him love you.
Do you think anything else
under heaven really matters?"
- James Baldwin

[Leta Rebecca Cunningham · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous

[Gregory Duke · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5

I adore Robin Coste Lewis, but this is a lackadaisical nonevent of a sequence. Superficially pleasant. I sense very little rationale for poring over this instead of turning to some Cavafy.

[Diana Arterian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lewis once again gifts us a book of gorgeous poems. "Archive of Desire" circles how we ache for connection—how ancient that is, as is everything that keeps us apart (usually ourselves). This is the kind of collection we all need now more than ever, determined by love and relating to one another.

[H]

o this is excellent. this made me want to write, which is the highest compliment i can give