Coal

by Remi Graves

Blackfriars Bridge, 1905. A Black Cherokee man is arrested and charged as a ‘wandering lunatic’. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later.

In the absence of Paul Downing’s own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.

56 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2025

Reviews

[Tass · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

wonderful rejection of & expansion beyond what the archive collects. especially moved by paul and cole go up

[rayon · Rating 5 out of 5]

remi's lines are a gift. in coal there is such an intimate resistance and invitation of black trans living. it feels so curled inward (secretive) and defiant (black queer trans living persisting, insisting, in subterfuge, weaving multiple chronologies together, in secret, beyond the visible) that when surfaced through the deftness of graves lines, the result it as stunning tapestry of black trans life, love, intimacy and unyielding connection, imbued with an originality of image that blew me away. 'sew me into every atom of air' refuses to leave my mind amongst many others. what i love so much is that remi is not afraid of forms, not merely structurally but spatially; spiritual and visually there is an unafraid voice peaking here; pushing poetic form past usual realities and into lines and curves it was so freeing to witness that i did cry. i sent necrogeomancy to my black trans lover immediately after my first read, this form of archival venturing and exploration takes us on a journey that feels so intra-communal and resonant. coal is my new favourite poetry collection.