Archive of Desire: A poem in four parts for C. P. Cavafy

by Robin Coste Lewis

The National Book Award, PEN/Voelcker Award, 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 antiquity through the present day. Her second book was an expansive hybrid photographic and poetic study of human migration and the human family. Now she delivers a “poem in four parts,” which originated as a musical, visual, and lyrical collaboration with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu, with Lewis on the microphone offering a live reading of this sequence. Ignited by their encounters with Cavafy’s archive, in the heart of Athens, the multimedia quartet exalted the liminal spaces where desire and diaspora meet—where art often asserts itself most forcefully. In this volume, Lewis brings this performance to life on the page, where the poem weaves in and out of Cavafy’s bedrooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic excavation underpinning all of his work. Lewis converses directly with Mr. “often you / reminded us that // the only true / barbarians are the ones / raging in silence inside // of our own / minds.” But she also brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Compton/Closet Self-Portrait at Sixteen, 1979.”

As in all Lewis’s works, here she reaches across centuries 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, and the unfolding journey of being human, whose contours become clear only with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.

Genres: Poetry

91 pages, Kindle Edition

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.

[H]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.