Without Terminus - by Chaun Webster (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"Through experimenting with form, imagery, style, and language, the author makes a valiant attempt and succeeds in elegant and luminous prose. . . . Give this marvelous journey to readers of Joshua Bennett's Owed and Claudia Rankine's Just Us."--Allison Escoto, Booklist

"Read in wonder. That is all. Wonder that Without Terminus was written, and in exactly this wondrous way, by a writer who is endlessly inventive."--Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Brooklyn Rail

"webster's writing leaps to its apex in the flow and exploratory possibilities of language. It's a prose poem, a manifesto and even an ars poetica. . . . In the capable hands of webster, one finds a poetics that is simultaneously challenging, alienating, and in spite of it all, a bridge."--Filiz Turhan, West Trade Review

"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

"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

"webster, already a formidable poet, charts a genealogy of loss through an inquiry and lyric form of his own making, gifting a map that cracks open the expansive possibilities of memoir. . . . webster wonders "if blackness is the grammar of loss in the modern world" and if "we have all been had, gotten over, by the archive and the slippery words that make blackness known only when it is about to disappear." Perhaps yes, but Without Terminus ardently contends with these erasures of the Black past, present, and future."--Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, author of Negative Money

"Without Terminus does the uncanny, and absolutely sincere, work of obliterating everything I thought I knew about fracture, memory, labor, and Blackness. . . . The book is as fine, as delightful, as serious as any book I've read this century. There is a staggering gumption at work here, and it is indeed generative and wholly loving of what came before it."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

"Familial and radically unfamiliar. Old and new, on time, untimely; ungendered, ante-generic, intergenerational. . . . What we have here in our hands is as beautiful and bruised and black and blue and bounteous and unbound as we R."--Fred Moten, author of Perennial Fashion

"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

About the Author