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.

‘coal is betwixt. It is from the intimate galaxy where all our lost things (loves, threads, pocket treasures, records, last dimes) don’t know they’re lost. A place made out of time. Of words and no words, of stones and psalms, of lines and kin. Lapidary and lineal. Remi Graves writes like memory – recursive, invented, porous, specific – between this moment and the past – backforthly – always “shifting away and coming closer.” Innovative, quiet, and wholehearted, this book is an ouroboros or an ocean of yearning and arrival. I want to live in its loop, in its depths. Maybe I do, maybe we all do. Maybe that’s why it feels like home.’

— Anne de Marcken

‘This is a searing, spectral excavation of Black transmasculine fugitivity, where its archive is both wound and portal. Through a lyricism that is at once tender and unflinching, Graves conjures Paul Downing, a Black Cherokee trans man un/lost to the violent annals of history, staging a transtemporal communion that defies the linearity of time. Here, racialized gender is a geography to be escaped (“if gender be a place / let me be unfindable there”), and the body is a site of both rupture and resurrection. With poems that oscillate between elegy and incantation – indeed, prayerful blasphemy – Graves refuses a necropolitical gaze, opting instead for a poetics of refusal and shimmering possibility.’
— Marquis Bey

‘Remi Graves’ coal performs a circuit between “seeing” and “knowing”, an experiment in saturation and narrative that is immensely moving. It “did something to me”, as Graves writes, evoking a book that's closed without the place being marked. One of my favourite pages is titled ‘Dream Vision of Cole and Paul meeting as musical score’. Below it is a drawing that emanates light touch and extemporary delight. Open the book and there it is, a page you did not expect to see. Here is Paul, who died on the summer solstice in 1906. Imagine the sun burning a hole through the paper. Look through the hole and there's Paul, living and dying in excess of the archive's capacity to behold the extent and possibility of Paul. Leave flowers on the ground. Write. Keep going until you reach it, the place where “times touch”, and a portal opens.’
— Bhanu Kapil

‘coal is a poignant engagement with Black trans history. Remi Graves’ search for the elusive presence of Paul Downing in the archive perfectly captures the sense of longing for connection across time.’
— Onni Gust

‘This is an exquisitely poised and sensitive collection of poems. In their search for Paul Downing, Remi Graves takes us beyond the archives into a dream-like elsewhere that admits the impossibility of retrieval, and yet manages to conjure Paul Downing, fleetingly, respectfully, and somehow consensually. Each piece is a radical act of language, love, kinship and attention, and this collection is unmissable, sublime.’
— Fiona Benson